By now, gentle readers, you have probably seen the Javamancy mini post about the one-liner deletion for .svn files.

I really like Adam Bien. He seems like a nice guy, and I occasionally drop by his blog, on a lark, to read his stuff, which is often focused on Java and NetBeans, one of our favorite IDE’s that we use regularly for DevPal and Javamancy dev work, especially for Java and PHP. Now, I have never met him personally (which is unfortunate, since the inevitable Formidable Brain-Pick would come out, and I’d be picking his brain with it furiously (figuratively, ‘natch)), nor have I observed his programming, CM, and shell skills in action.

So I thought it was curious that he posted about how to delete all .svn files with a “one-liner”. Being a collector of snazzy UNIX scripting that make my life easier, I just had to look…

The Debated Script

Now, keep in mind that Adam mentions that he found the one-liner elsewhere, but he liked it enough to post it.

Here is what he suggests as the one-liner:

find . -name ".svn" -exec rm -rf {} \;

And this would be fine, under normal circumstances, if you are considering a relatively small population of .svn files that you want to remove and you do not care if somebody mistakenly named something on the filesystem as “.svn” despite it not being a Subversion directory.

But if you are like me, and/or you have at least one of several different CM structures that you support within one or more different versioning systems, and/or you have both people and automata that frequently access and modify those CM structures, you are most likely going to have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of .svn directories that you have to account for. And you may have noticed that when you feed a large parameterized file list to the rm command directly causes it to choke after only a few hundred (or in some cases, several thousands, depending on your OS) entries.

What DevPal Does

So here’s an excerpt from one of my scripts that leverages the xargs utility to spoon-feed the rm command with smaller digestible chunks from the potentially huge file list that the find command readily retrieves:

find . -type d -name .svn | xargs rm -rfv

Like Adam’s snippet, I want to use the current directory position, but if you want to parameterize that to some other location (i.e., other than “.”), you certainly could.

Also, note that I’m only interested in directory names… I am not interested in non-directories that match “.svn“. This may or may not be the behavior you are supporting, so you may want to change the filetype specifier (say, to “f“) or drop it altogether.

Now, for the rm command switches: I tend to like to see what is going on during the deletion process, so in addition to inducing recursion through directories and forcing deletion without confirmation, I also want a bit of on-screen verbosity to show me what is being deleted. In this way, if I want to log the behavior, I can certainly redirect the output to a file or to a remote service. Anybody Hudson’ing, or just Ant’ing or Maven’ing with this?

Script or Not?

Technically, while Adam offered up the one-liner as just that… a one-liner… I would guess that many of you have wondered about whether it makes more sense to wrap a script around it and give it a snazzy name. My recommendation is, of course, yes.

N.B.

.svn as a directory

You may have noticed that there seems to be an interchangeable use of “files” and “directories” when referring to the .svn content. Which is correct? Both, actually, and it depends on your approach or perspective.

Contents of the .svn directory

Whenever you browse your local directories within your sandbox, you will see that the .svn entries are actually directories. But if you peek into those directories, you will notice that there appears to be a set naming scheme to the files in there… as if they are arranged in a certain way to allow something (like a local database engine or parser ( )) to efficiently access and modify the metadata for the versioned content. So, when referring to the .svn structure and contents, the UNIX-y notion of directories being also files can be more-inclusive.

By the way, this notion is also applicable for other versioning systems, including CVS (Subversion’s forebear).

For those of you who are old enough to remember the monumental three-way product/platform wars between a variety of different players, as well as the various face-offs between heated contenders, you can often slot the threesters into that ol’ Good-Bad-Ugly trifecta.

Perhaps not this time, however.

Apple’s [AAPL] Snow Leopard OS release on August 28, 2009 has an opponent in the game console arena from none other than Microsoft [MSFT], in the form of a decent amount of price-slashing, which improves market/player share and reduces inventory nicely. This allows Microsoft to offset the later availability of their own OS replacement coming, Windows 7. And the same-day alert of price cutting on August 28, 2009 steals a lot of the thunder from Sony’s [SNE] own announcement earlier this month about the upcoming PlayStation 3 Slim, which is now announced for a September 1, 2009 North American release. Although the Xbox 360 Elite remains fundamentally the same, it is still a strong contender against the PS3 Slim, so the pricing and software libraries will ultimately decide this latest round in console supremacy.

Admittedly, this is a crooked kind of comparison, but there is a lot of convergence going on, primarily to set the stage for future products and services in the pipelines. It also opens up the possibility of niche players potentially making a play for a greater presence in the realms of gaming, general computing, and mobile computing and entertainment.

Could there possibly be any company willing to step up on August 28, 2009, the official release date for Apple‘s [AAPL] new version of their popular operating system, OS X. This new version, codenamed Snow Leopard, is 10.6, but it seems to provide quite a few new features and revisions for existing capabilities.

What is quite intriguing is the server OS release, timed to be simultaneous with the “regular” client version: the Mobility Access Server and the Podcast Producer packages, incorporated with the new version, may be quite the darlings of the SMB and creative designer crowds (which may experience quite a bit of convergence as a result of this).

And while rival Microsoft [MSFT] has been keeping their OS prices relatively steep for the anticipated Windows 7, Apple is clearly aiming to keep the OS upgrade affordable for the masses, at a paltry $29.99 USD. In addition to just a single-user license, it will also be available in its multi-user family pack version; and the newer “boxed set” version of OS X bundled with iLife and iWork will also be available (although there is some question as to whether the boxed set represents a multi-user licensing scheme or not).

And even more fierce: OS X Server Edition is also discounted, down to $499 USD for its unlimited user edition, which is a dramatic 50% price discount.

If you’re like me and sometimes really tax your Mac (this is assuming you are, in fact, a Mac owner), you may experience a kernel panic.

They’re not fun.

Some people have observed that they have occurred while using seemingly innocuous applications like Firefox 3.0.x, or a mixture of PowerPC-based and Intel-based applications. But, unfortunately, the causes for kernel panics may not be so obvious. And just as unfortunate, there are some disagreements about what causes or leads to kernel panics.

Here’s an example: a seemingly straightforward tutorial for identifying kernel panic causes. While the article presents itself as somewhat authoritative, you may notice that there are several points of contention in the comments section. Curious, eh?

At this point, several of you have already experienced the harrowing excitement surrounding the Apple’s [AAPL] OS X 10.5.7 update for Macs.

Earlier today, I’d spotted the OS update on my MacBook White while traveling. I did not think anything unusual about it, since it was just started to make the rounds, and nobody had yet begun to report odd occurrences with it… So I accepted the update notice from the Software Update applet and attended to other business…

An hour later, when I returned to gather my things, I saw that the update transaction had failed.

Uh-oh. Redrum?

Apparently, there was a security violation error that occurred during the download process; a checksum had failed. I chalked that up to some sort of issue with the wireless download at my (temporary) location.

So, I waited a few hours and tried again… The download completed successfully, but then during the installation process, it seemed that the system rebooted more than once.

Now that was odd… Another multi-reboot update? It’s been a loooong time since one of those. What was the security patching involved?

The update took a quite some time, on a notebook that was only newly acquired and set up, so there was not much cruft on the system. Nevertheless, it took quite some time, at least twenty minutes, before the system completed the update. Once it completed, I noticed that instead of bringing the system back online, it had been shut down.

Curious and curiouser…

Although I feared the worst, it did not seem to manifest, as I restarted the notebook and logged in. Nothing out of the ordinary. Seems good. Business as usual. Cool beans. And Java development, while we’re at it.

But I wonder how many other people were having problems, or at the very least hiccups such as mine. Apparently, as I did some browsing on the subject, other people had experienced problems, some fairly severe. Hopefully, a more recent revision of the update will be available, or a remedial update available from Apple.

There already seems to be some market movements for Apple [AAPL] today, as the WWDC 2008 starts today. My previous post brought forth an overview of the technical conference, but I’m sure a lot of people will be focusing on the Other Steve’s keynote address, particularly with regard to the iPhone.

But I suspect there will still be plenty of new things to explore (this is aimed at us techies, right?), particularly with regard to Macs and OS X. Nevertheless, I am certainly also curious about what is going to happen to the iPhone: not just any performance/speed improvements, but also the software that may be written for it (again, the technies’ allure)… especially on the Java-Android issue.

Lots of anticipation for this year’s premiere annual Apple-related developer conference, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which runs June 9-13, 2008.

Like the Macworld Expo 2008 earlier, this is a venue for Apple [AAPL] and Steve Jobs to wow everybody with their upcoming, their latest, and improvements to their greatest– in a people-friendly way during the keynotes and techie ways during the sessions.

Of course, this year’s conference is a bit more special:

• The iPhone controversy and the highly anticipated upgrade for the platform’s eponymous mobile/convergence platform;
• The upcoming Macs;
• OS X 10.6;
• Is Apple going to make a bigger play for LB’s (using its expected revamped iPhone and new Macs with OS X) and try for a piece of the SMB pie that has been a mainstay of Dell [DELL] and Microsoft [MSFT] for so long?

This year’s stock markets have been pummeled with rampant oil speculation and massive financial company failures in the face of improprieties with crazy mortgages… Are we going to get the happy-shiny news that will put the fire back into our bellies?

Some business and convergence questions to (try to) answer during this conference:

1. Will the next generation of the iPhone become affordable and ubiquitous enough to become that ever-elusive digital communicator device (much discussed and promised back in 2000)?
2. Does Apple’s iPhone still have the momentum to push past the Google [GOOG] Android SDK and GPhone implementation roadmap?
3. Will Sun [JAVA] bring its JVM to the iPhone quickly enough to force a major disruptive innovation for corporate, consumer, and professional audiences, heralding the start of the Third Age of Java?
4. … Or will Google bring its own Java-Android VM implementation to the iPhone, making the iPhone the first practical GPhone implementation?
5. Will OS X become an independent entity from the Macs that have long supported it, or will it remain one of the chief differentiators of Apple computers?
6. Does OS X’s ease-of-use for developers translate well to server suitability and optimization, as a native deployment and/or virtualization platform?
7. How will the stock markets react to announcements from the Other Steve on his new offerings?

These questions, and more, will have to wait until the start of the conference on June 9.

Tracking the WWDC Keynote

MacRumors announced that it plans to track the keynote via blogstream, so you can follow along. The keynote is expected to start around 10:00 AM Pacific Time on June 9.

I’m sure there will be plenty of other blogs and streams available for the event. Good times, folks!