UPDATE April 2015: I've now updated the CLM for IDL vesion 8.4, for use with BBEdit 11.x. You can download it here.
For nearly a decade I've been using IDL, a programming language that's good for visualising lots of data. Recent versions ship with an IDE based on Eclipse, which is either horrible or great depending on whether you're an advocate of the Eclipse environment. I'm not.
Call me old fashioned, but I like to code in a simple text editor, and debug from a terminal. I work on Mac OS X, and my choice of text editor is BBEdit or TextWrangler, both from BareBones. TextWrangler is free and should be on every Mac, and BBEdit costs money but has some great additional features. I've tried to find a text editor as useful on Windows, but there just isn't one.
A few years ago I wrote a Codeless Language Module (CLM) for BBEdit (and TextWrangler), so that it can apply syntax highlighting to IDL source code. The CLM is a .plist file, which is a flavour of XML that contains keys described in BareBones' documentation that allow lots of cool stuff to happen. This includes:
syntax highlighting (comments, quotes, etc)
keyword highlighting (and predefined names)
autocompletion of function names
function scanning (makes function names apear in the function pop-up menu for easy navigation)
automatic recognition of language based on filename extension
code folding
Here's what it looks like:
The IDL Configuration.plist file is provided here for you to download. There are some comments at the top of the file about how it was generated - mainly for my own memory so I can regenerate it when a new version if IDL comes out. It refers to some custom functions I wrote to extract information from the IDL documentation and help files, and generally make life easier. If you'd like to get hold of these functions let me know.
Using CTAGS with IDL and BBEdit/TextWrangler
As an added bonus, we can also use Exuberant Ctags to scan IDL code files and generate 'tags' files. These are used by BBEdit for autocompletion. The use of ctags is well documented in the BBEdit manual, so I won't go into detail here, except to say that they're great, and I have written a routine to generate a 'tags' file for IDL codefiles, which you can download here. You also need to have the appropriate stuff in ~/.ctags for ctags to scan your *.pro files correctly. These are the lines that do the magic:
This is something I needed to do in order to back up some Windows systems with rsnapshot, a python script that uses rsync. Getting it to back up Windows systems over the network requires that the Windows computers share the directory or directories that need to be backed up, and the Mac OS X box mounts the shares for the backup to run. There may be other ways, but this works well for us at the moment. The only issue has been working out how to mount Windows shares with spaces in their names from a bash script, so the backup could be scheduled to run automatic and unattended.
It took a while to figure out. Googling didn't really help much - there were plenty of suggestions but nothing actually worked. These ranged from quoting the space with backslashes, replacing the quote with its octal representation (\040), using double-quotes. In the end, many people suggest that renaming the share to get rid of the space is the way to go.
In the past this is what I'd done: altered the name of the Windows share to remove the spaces, but in the back of my mind I knew it should be possible. Finally I got around to working it out properly...
The following are known to work in Mac OS X 10.9 with shares from Windows 7, XP and Vista. There are two steps to mount the share.
Create the mount point
This is pretty straightforward. If this is done in the bash shell the spaces can be quoted with a backslash, or the entire name can be double-quoted. The mount point can be created anywhere in the file system, but if it's in /Volumes the mounted volume will be available in the Finder.
mkdir /Volumes/Share\ Point
or
mkdir /Volumes/"Share Point"
Mount the share
This is done at the bash prompt or in a script using the mount command. You must specify the username and password, the address of the server, the name of the share and the mount point.
The path to the mount point is fairly simple. In typical bash fashion it can be specified with double quotes or the space could be preceded with a backslash - either will work. The real trick is getting the path to the SMB share exactly right. My first (failed) attempts were to use double quotes as follows:
> mount -t smbfs "//username:password@ip_number/Share Point" "/Volumes/Share Point"
mount_smbfs: URL parsing failed, please correct the URL and try again: Invalid argument
which clearly did not work. Next try was escaping the space with a backslash:
> mount -t smbfs //username:password@ip_number/Share\ Point "/Volumes/Share Point"
mount_smbfs: URL parsing failed, please correct the URL and try again: Invalid argument
which also failed. Similarly, using the octal representation of the space:
> mount -t smbfs //username:password@ip_number/Share\040Point "/Volumes/Share Point"
mount_smbfs: mount error: /Volumes/Bruker Backup: Unknown error: -1073741412
this gave an exciting new error message, but still failed :(
Finally, I was successful when I replaced the space with %20 its URL-encoded representation:
mount -t smbfs //username:password@ip_number/Share%20Point /Volumes/Share\ Point/
Phew! The share will now be available in /Volumes, and also visible in the Finder. When you're finished with it and it's no longer needed, it can be unmounted in the Terminal with
umount /Volumes/Share\ Point
or by Ejecting it in the Finder.
Getting it to work in a bash script
I use a function within a bash script to do the mounting of smb shares. I pass in the username and password, the server name and the share name and the function does the heavy lifting. If the share name to be mounted has spaces in its name, the spaces must be replaced with %20 in the function call. Within the function the share name is used with the %20 in the call to mount, and the %20 is replaced with a space and the share name is double-quoted when used to create the mount point, specify the mount point in the mount call, and to unmount the share when it's no longer needed. A proof of concept script would look something like:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
IP="192.168.0.1"
USERNAME="username"
PASSWD="password"
SHARE_NAME="Share%20Point"
# bash can replace the %20 with a space...
MOUNT_POINT="/Volumes/${SHARE_NAME//\%20/\ }"
mkdir "${MOUNT_POINT}"
mount -t smbfs "//${USERNAME}:${PASSWD}@${IP}/${SHARE_NAME}" "${MOUNT_POINT}"
# do something useful with the share at this point
umount "${MOUNT_POINT}"
