Snip

Snip is a public snippet publishing service using 9p. You can publish arbitrary files and get a list of what's available for viewing. A common usage is to publish your snarf buffer, but this is no longer the default; use 'snip /dev/snarf' instead.

The snipserv is any unauthenticated 9p connection. At the time of writing, the default server is simply using ramfs(4), exposing it via listen(8). At startup, the cpu server runs

auth/none ramfs -S snipserv

from cfg/hostname/cpustart and has a /rc/bin/service/tcp17037 like

#!/bin/rc
echo `{date -n}  $* `{cat $3^/remote} > /sys/log/pubsrv
exec exportfs -S /srv/pubsrv

The logging line is optional and particularly redundant if your local listen(8) instance is logging affirmative connections.

This is only an example; the snipserv at 9srv.net will shortly be replaced with something which, at a minimum, has a persistent backing store so snippets survive server reboots.

As an alternative way of getting at snippets (especially on hypothetical other servers), I've added the following to my local 9fs:

# snippet services
case *!snip
	srv -cnmq tcp!^`{echo $1 | sed 's/snip$/17037/'} $1 /n/$1

See /n/sources/contrib/anothy/bin/rc/9fs for my complete 9fs.

The snip program has, to date, had less than one hour cumulative development time put into it. Partly, that's a testament to the ease of doing things with 9p and rc, but mostly it's a warning about reliability.

The draft man page for snip follows.

NAME

snip - publish snippets

SYNOPSIS

snip file...

DESCRIPTION

Snip is a public snippet publishing service using 9p. It can be used to quickly publish arbitrary files to a unique and publicly accessible location, or to obtain a list of already-published snippets availabe for reading.

Invoked with one or more arguments, snip will connect to an unauthenticated 9p service on the server named by the environment variable $snipserv (or 9srv.net if unset) on port 17037 and copy each file to a uniqe name on the server, reporting the name.

Invoked without arguments, snip will connect to a server as above and will list the snippets available on that server.

To ease retrieval, in either case snip leaves snipserv mounted in the current namespace.

SOURCE

/n/sources/contrib/anothy/bin/rc/snip

SEE ALSO

cat(1), cp(1)

AUTHOR

Anthony Sorace (anthony@strand1.com)