¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

So far I’ve been using the dev and devops tags pretty much interchangeably (and inconsistently) in this blog. There’s no real difference: Dev and Ops work overlap quite a lot. It’s time to do some house cleaning and merge them. I choose dev as it is more generic / agnostic.

First step, use sed to rename all devops tags to dev:

% ack -l -- "^  - devops"  | xargs -n 1 gsed -i -e 's/^  - devops/  - dev/g'

I use gsed, the GNU flavour of sed, in macOS via homebrew. This is necessary because vanilla /usr/bin/sed from macOS keeps littering my system with .-e files, the original files before inplace modification (-i), whereas gsed doesn’t. It saves me from having to do rm **/*.-e as an extra step.

Then delete one of two - dev occurrences in a row:

% ack -l -- "^  - dev"  | xargs -n 1 gsed -i -e '/^  - dev/{N;s/\n  - dev//;}'

I know how to write this sed expression by hand, but ChatGPT helped me craft it nonetheless. The whole cult of memorizing sed¹ commands by heart has been obsoleted by GenAI, for better or worse.

During iteration between the two commands above I snapshotted the first one with a git commit, so that it was easy to git reset --hard my initial failed attempt of the second command.