[Solved] A Challenge: Loop meld to update *.pacnew files

Question

I got no secret, I love meld .  Does a great job of showing differences alot of times if even scattered all over the page, allows for copy and paste...  vimdiff is good but requires a much more keypresses, copy and paste isn't as elegant, and with my fixed drop-down terminal is just too narrow to be able to do it well.  So what I usually end up doing is:
find /etc -type f -name "*.pacnew"
and just go through them one at a time:
kdesu meld /etc/config /etc/config.pacnew
I haven't do much work with loops, so I was hoping that someone that knew a little about them that could create a script that would go through them one by one.  I suppose this is going to be a little tricker because (I imagine) it's going to have to detect when the windowed instance closes.
From the knowledge I know, I would do:
#!/bin/bash
# etc-update - merge *.pacnew files with original configurations with meld
pacnew=$(find /etc -type f -name "*.pacnew")
for i in $pacnew
do
kdesu meld $i
done
Which isn't going to work very well.  Well, I guess it could, but it's going to open them all at once and leave a nice scruched-up taskbar with *.pacnew files.  Like to be able to go through them one by one.
Anyone had any experiences at this that could help?
Last edited by Gen2ly (2009-10-03 01:46:55)

Answer 1

brisbin33 wrote:
http://pbrisbin.com:8080/bin/pacnews
just do a find/replace of vimdiff for meld (or whatever...)
Nice script, bris.  If I had know about that before, I'd be using it.   Do like the idea of the walk-through process and the saving of the the current one.
lol, I just read your last post and just what I thought about.
ugkbunb wrote:I just edited the pacdiff script to use meld and it worked great : ) -- I am not at home atm, but if you would like I can post up my edited pacdiff script.
Yeah, I saw that on the wiki.  Said it was for CLI though so I didn't get to try.
@ lolilolicon, and Procyon
Still learning about pids, what I have seen was more complicated than this.  Pretty clever.
Allan wrote:
Maybe....
#!/bin/bash
# etc-update - merge *.pacnew files with original configurations with meld
pacnew=$(find /etc -type f -name "*.pacnew")
for i in $pacnew
do
kdesu meld $(basename $i .pacmew) $i &
wait
done
Note - untested
Ah, very nice.  Also fits into my knowledge of bash.   Hadn't thought about just using & but it works great.  Had to truncate the file extension and just used a bash filter:
#!/bin/bash
# pacnew-diff - merge *.pacnew files with original configurations with meld
pacnew=$(find /etc -type f -name "*.pacnew")
for config in $pacnew
do
kdesu meld ${config%\.*} $config &
wait
done
Like to be able to do a backup of the current config and then erase the pacnew file afterword, but havn't found out a way to do that without having to type in a password everytime, but, I guess, that can easily be done elsewhere.
Last edited by Gen2ly (2009-10-02 20:27:17)