I’m often making shell scripts for various things – sometimes just a quick one for a specific task, sometimes just to test something out, sometimes for some kind of workflow task that I plan to keep around.

It’s always the same steps:

1. Create the file.
2. Add the header: #! /bin/bash
3. Write the code.
4. Save it.
5. Exit the editor.
6. Make it executable with chmod +x <filename>
7. Run, test, edit, etc.

When you’re repeating yourself, time for some automation. So I wrote a shell script that creates shell scripts.

#! /bin/bash
if [ -f "$1" ]
then
  echo "$1 already exists"
exit 1
fi
echo '#! /bin/bash' > $1
chmod +x $1
$EDITOR $1

Create a file, add that code, make it executable (sound familiar?) and put it somewhere in your path. I named mine newss for new shell script.

Now you can just say:

newss test.sh

And you are editing an executable shell script. As you can see, it checks to see if the file exists as a minimum level of safety. It will follow any paths, such as:

newss foo/bar/test.sh

But only if the directories exist. Creating non-existent directories wouldn’t be too hard if that’s important to you.