Raspberry Pi Journal #22

Constructing ToDo Files  

I'm rather busy. In fact, I'm so busy that I'm constructing a master ToDo list, and it's rather long. So, I cast about ways to automate the process. Well, Linux to the rescue. It has sophisticated shell commands that allows me to sort the different stages on my list. This is an example of my master todo list, called "MasterTask.txt"

TASK: Petit Computer
Petit Computer Picross Dec 2012 hold
Petit Computer Journal #N WITCH start
Petit Computer Journal #N Virtual Keyboard todo
Petit Computer Journal #N Turtle Graphic

TASK: Raspi Journal
Raspi Journal: ebook - calibre - done
Raspi Journal: Log Frequency List
Raspi Journal: ToDo List
Raspi Journal: webcam, motion: Deer camera on the cheap todo
Raspi Journal: SD Back Up #3 Success with TAR
Raspi Journal: SD Back Up #4 A little thing called rsync
Raspi Journal: Can a Raspberry Pi be used to create a backup of itself?
Raspi Journal: SD wear leveling

TASK: Book Reading
Raspberry Pi for Beginner done
Programming Linux Games
Algorithm in C++
Modernist Cuisine at Home

So, as you can see, the format is simple. There is "TASK:" in the beginning of a line, representing a header. A single line per task, and a status word at the end of the line. They are:

start - the project has been started
todo - the project has been scheduled
hold - the project has been put on hold
wait - the project is waiting for a missing part
done - the project has been completed
skip - the project has been cancelled

What's the difference between started and scheduled? Sometimes, the project needs some materials to be purchased. While I'm gathering materials for the project, it will not be scheduled. Only once all the materials has been gathered will the project status be changed to "todo"

So, what I want to do is to create several files:
TaskToday.txt - contains all the "start" and "todo" projects
TaskHold.txt - contains all the "wait" and "hold" projects
TaskDone.txt - contains all the "done" and "skip" projects
TaskLog.txt - a running log of all projects done.
TaskNext.txt - The updated MasterTask.txt minus all the finished projects

Looks to be comprehensive, right? Usually, in C programming, I would need quite a lot of lines of code in order to achieve those tasks. I need a less lines if I'm using one of those "convenient" scripting language, such as Perl. I'm wondering just how difficult it is to do the whole thing using bash shell. In fact, here is the script that I'm using.

#!/bin/bash

cat MasterTask.txt | grep -e ^TASK -e 'todo *' -e 'start *' > TaskToday.txt
cat MasterTask.txt | grep -e ^TASK -e 'hold *' -e 'wait *' > TaskHold.txt
cat MasterTask.txt | grep -e ^TASK -e 'done *' -e 'skip *' > TaskDone.txt
cat MasterTask.txt | grep -v -e 'done *' -e 'skip *' > TaskNext.txt

#CycleLog
date >> TaskLog.txt
cat TaskDone.txt >> TaskLog.txt
#cp TaskNext.txt MasterTask.txt

And that's it! Pretty much all one-liner. Let's explain this a little bit. I'm using the commands "cat", "grep", "date", and "cp". That's it. You can figure out what the options are from the "man" command. "man cat", "man grep", "man date", "man cp".

So, the first line, basically says: Type out the contents of MasterTask.txt and pipe it to "grep" which will take all the lines that is
1. Starts with "TASK" or
2. Ends with "todo" or
3. Ends with "start".
Then pipe those lines into a file called TaskToday.txt. Same thing with the next two lines with "hold/wait" and "done/skip"

The fourth line says to pipe the all the lines, *except* the ones that ends with "done/skip"

The "-e" option simulates egrep, except as I understand it, egrep is deprecated.

The Cycle Log part is simply appending the current date to TaskLog.txt, then piping out the content of "TaskDone.txt", appending it to TaskLog.txt. That's about it.

The last line is commented out, since I like to do it manually while testing the script. It simply replaced MasterTask.txt with TaskNext.txt. In other words, take out all the "done/skip" tasks from MasterTask.txt. It's that simple!