Simon Willison’s Weblog

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11 items tagged “bash”

2024

Running prompts against images and PDFs with Google Gemini. New TIL. I've been experimenting with the Google Gemini APIs for running prompts against images and PDFs (in preparation for finally adding multi-modal support to LLM) - here are my notes on how to send images or PDF files to their API using curl and the base64 -i macOS command.

I figured out the curl incantation first and then got Claude to build me a Bash script that I can execute like this:

prompt-gemini 'extract text' example-handwriting.jpg

Animated terminal demo. At the top of the screen is a example-handwriting.jpg with some rough handwriting. I run this command in a terminal: 
prompt-gemini 'extract text' example-handwriting.jpg It returns JSON showing 270 tokens used by gemini-1.5-flash-8b. Then I run the command again with -r on the end and it returns the text from the image: Example handwriting Let's try this out

Playing with this is really fun. The Gemini models charge less than 1/10th of a cent per image, so it's really inexpensive to try them out.

# 23rd October 2024, 6:25 pm / vision-llms, gemini, llm, bash, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, google, generative-ai, ocr, projects, llm-pricing

lsix (via) This is pretty magic: an ls style tool which shows actual thumbnails of every image in the current folder, implemented as a Bash script.

To get this working on macOS I had to update to a more recent Bash (brew install bash) and switch to iTerm2 due to the need for a Sixel compatible terminal.

# 6th June 2024, 10:07 pm / bash

# All the code is wrapped in a main function that gets called at the bottom of the file, so that a truncated partial download doesn't end up executing half a script.

tailscale.com/install.sh

# 29th April 2024, 9 pm / bash, tailscale

2022

A tiny CI system (via) Christian Ştefănescu shares a recipe for building a tiny self-hosted CI system using Git and Redis. A post-receive hook runs when a commit is pushed to the repo and uses redis-cli to push jobs to a list. Then a separate bash script runs a loop with a blocking “redis-cli blpop jobs” operation which waits for new jobs and then executes the CI job as a shell script.

# 26th April 2022, 3:39 pm / redis, continuous-integration, git, bash

2019

flk: A LISP that runs wherever Bash is (via) This is a heck of a project: an implementation of LISP written entirely in Bash, meaning you can run it as a script on any machine that has a Bash installation.

# 4th December 2019, 5:19 am / lisp, bash

2017

direnv (via) A shell extension (for bash, zsh and others) which can automatically set and unset environment variables when you cd into specific directories. Useful for managing things like a project’s GOPATH or automatically activating Python virtual environments.

# 5th November 2017, 7:59 pm / shell, bash, zsh

2012

What is a good programming language to learn after bash scripting?

Python is a good natural progression from bash in my opinion. It has an interactive prompt which supports bash-style exploratory programming, and it has libraries that mean it can be applied to an enormous range of problems—everything from game development to scientific computing to web applications.

[... 65 words]

2010

Using Bash’s History Effectively. The HISTIGNORE environment variable is particularly useful, allowing you to suppress certain commands by specifying a pattern. This article has a tip for causing a command to be omitted from the history if you prefix it with a space.

# 25th February 2010, 12:21 pm / bash, commandline

2009

shunit2 (via) xUnit style testing for shell scripts.

# 27th September 2009, 7:34 pm / unittesting, testing, bash, shell, unix, xunit, shunit2

BashReduce. Map/Reduce in Bash is no longer a joke project (if it ever was)—Richard Crowley is extending it and using it for analysis at OpenDNS.

# 28th June 2009, 3:03 pm / mapreduce, bash, bashreduce, richard-crowley, opendns

resty. 58 lines of bash provides a better command-line interface to RESTful APIs, using curl under the hood. This should save me from running “man curl” several times a week.

# 18th May 2009, 1:07 pm / curl, rest, apis, resty, commandline, bash