I’ve been keeping text files of my daily discoveries since around 2006. That is when I started using Linux for everyday tasks at home. And when I’m at work, I’d just try to do as much through Cygwin. Anyway, I ended up having to look up the same stuff repeatedly like how to burn a cd using dd, or how to setup sshd in Cygwin. One day, I just created a folder called kb and started pasting the commands into various text files called vim.txt, sshd_on_cygwin.txt, etc. At the bottom of each of those files, I would paste the URLs where I found those commands. Ten years later, I find myself doing this more often especially because I’m dealing with a lot more tools and techonlogies than before. Everyday is filled with npm this, gem that, patch here, and drush there. When I get quite time, though, I like to read through the references from the most recent notes.

Here is how I would open the references with Chrome:

Show contents of file:

cat notes.txt

Output:

This is a text file.

## Resources

- http://example.com/source-1
- http://example.com/source-2
- http://example.com/source-3
- http://example.com/source-4
- http://example.com/source-5
- http://example.com/source-6
- http://example.com/source-7

For the last five lines, strip out leading dashes, strip out blank lines, and open each in Chrome:

cat notes.txt | tail -5 | sed 's/^- //' | grep -v -e '^$' | xargs -n 1 open -a 'Google Chrome'

Resources