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Mnemonics

This page outlines stuff I stumble upon, remember that I actually know this, but still not use in my daily practice and forgot about. Shame on me, because I should use this!

Use the right tool for the work

install

Often there is a simple tool that does exactly what you want. Consider this piece of a bash script:

mkdir /etc/systemd/system/podman.service.d
chmod 0755 /etc/systemd/system/podman.service.d
chown root:root /etc/systemd/system/podman.service.d
cp podman.conf /etc/systemd/system/podman.service.d/
chmod 0644 /etc/systemd/system/podman.service.d/podman.conf
chown root:root /etc/systemd/system/podman.service.d/podman.conf

The above works perfectly well. Is it readable? Yes, probably. Still, there is a tool for this. Not often used in the wild, but mandatory for package maintainers, install. The sole purpose of this is tool is to install files with the correct mode and ownership in a single command. The above using install would then look like:

install -o root -g root -m 0755 -d /etc/systemd/system/podman.service.d
install -o root -g root -m 0644 podman.conf /etc/systemd/system/podman.service.d

More elegant, isn't it? So, go and use install from now on!

Last update: October 9, 2023