There is a leading whitespace

On Nov 29, 2007, at 8:14 AM, Robin Houston wrote:

On 29/11/2007, Kai Janson kaijanson@thejeeper.net wrote:

...

dscl . -read /Users/$USER RealName |sed -e "s/RealName://" -e "s/^ \ //" | tail -1

I don't understand why that can't just be

dscl . -read /Users/$USER RealName |sed 's/RealName: //'

?

Or an alternative approach:

perl -le 'print +(getpwuid $<)[6]'

Robin

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Yes, I am running Leopard 10.5.1 and there is actually a white space in front of the name. I assume that your dscl . -read /Users/$USER RealName |sed 's/ RealName: //' works on Tiger but it does not work on Leopard.

There is no trailing white space on Leopard, thus it fails to sed anything. The technique I use is overkill. I could have used

dscl . -read /Users/$USER RealName | tail -1

but then I would end up with the name plus a leading white space.

dscl . -read /Users/$USER RealName | tail -1 | sed -e "s/^\ //"

That line fishes the real name out of dscl's database, then eliminates the first line altogether and finally removes the leading white space if there is one.

Here a snippet from my shell:

mac-mini-intel:Tasks kjanson$ res=`dscl . -read /Users/$USER RealName | tail -1` mac-mini-intel:Tasks kjanson$ echo "'$res'" ' Kai Janson' mac-mini-intel:Tasks kjanson$ res=`dscl . -read /Users/$USER RealName | tail -1 | sed -e "s/^\ //"` mac-mini-intel:Tasks kjanson$ echo "'$res'" 'Kai Janson'

--Kai

On Nov 29, 2007, at 10:58 AM, Robin Houston wrote:

Are you sure? There isn't one on my computer; though I'm still running 10.4, so it could be different.

(You noticed that I added a space after the colon in the regular expression?)

Robin

On 29/11/2007, Kai Janson kaijanson@thejeeper.net wrote:

...

There is a leading whitespace

On Nov 29, 2007, at 8:14 AM, Robin Houston wrote:

...

On 29/11/2007, Kai Janson kaijanson@thejeeper.net wrote:

...

dscl . -read /Users/$USER RealName |sed -e "s/RealName://" -e "s/^ \ //" | tail -1

I don't understand why that can't just be

dscl . -read /Users/$USER RealName |sed 's/RealName: //'

?

Or an alternative approach:

perl -le 'print +(getpwuid $<)[6]'

Robin

---

For new threads USE THIS: textmate@lists.macromates.com (threading gets destroyed and the universe will collapse if you don't) http://lists.macromates.com/mailman/listinfo/textmate

---

For new threads USE THIS: textmate@lists.macromates.com (threading gets destroyed and the universe will collapse if you don't) http://lists.macromates.com/mailman/listinfo/textmate

---

For new threads USE THIS: textmate@lists.macromates.com (threading gets destroyed and the universe will collapse if you don't) http://lists.macromates.com/mailman/listinfo/textmate

Excerpts from Robin Houston's message of Thu Nov 29 13:19:21 -0500 2007:

perl -le 'print +(getpwuid $<)[6]'

is portable and concise (and not likely to break when Apple change their bizarre tool in yet another incompatible way).

There's also the slightly longer but slightly clearer Ruby equivalent:

ruby -retc -e 'puts Etc.getpwuid.gecos'

On 29 Nov 2007, at 19:19, Robin Houston wrote:

[...] is portable and concise (and not likely to break when Apple change their bizarre tool in yet another incompatible way).

From the r1431 release notes:

[NEW] TextMate sets TM_FULLNAME (unless you set it yourself) to the user’s full name, so no longer necessarily to fiddle with niutil and dscl to obtain it.

So it should not be necessary for commands/snippets to try and obtain the full username themselves.