My new blog and a Pacman surprise

Hello there.

So now I've read many blogs out there. And I think it's time that I also own some blogs about what I'm doing with my spare time and whatnot :P So I came across blogger.com and thought it would be a good idea to get my hands dirty and create one. So here we are.

First of all I want to tell you that pacman.d mirrorlist is sometimes really not ordered all that well :P So after waiting another round of minute for the VLC package to download completely, I figured it would be the best to just sit down and write this script:

tmpf=$(mktemp)
trap "rm -f $tmpf; exit" INT TERM
gawk '
/#?Server =/ {
  host = gensub(/^[^:]+:\/\/([^/]+).*/, "\\1", 1, $3)
  print host, $0
}' /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist |
while read host line; do
  echo "trying to ping '$host'" >/dev/stderr
  timed=$(ping -i 0.3 -c 1 -W 1 -n -q $host 2>/dev/null |
    tail -n1 |
    gawk '{ print $4 }' |
    cut -f2 -d/)
  [ x != x$timed ] && echo $timed ${line%#*};
done | LC_ALL=C sort -n | 
while read crap remains; do
  echo $remains \# $crap ms;
done > $tmpf

echo 'the following was created: '
cat $tmpf
echo -e '\nwant me to use it? (y|n)'
read reply
if [ x$reply = xy ]; then
  mv $tmpf /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
else
  rm -f $tmpf
fi

What does it do? Well, it basicially finds out the currently best order for the mirrorlist file, so that the fastest mirror is at the top. After running it, I was really impressed about the speed of pacman. It rushed through like a tiger :P