Running Clojure shell scripts in *nix environments

I was recently trying to create a basic piece of Clojure code to play with “real-time” log file parsing by playing with futures. The longer term goal of the experiment is to be able to tail -f a log file pipe that into my Clojure log parser as input.

As I wasn’t sure exactly what I would need to be doing, I wanted an easy way to run some code quickly without having to rebuild the jars through Leiningen every time I wanted to try something, in a manner similar to the way I am thinking I will be using it if the experiment succeeds.

I created a file test_input with the following lines:

1 hello
2 test
3 abacus
4 qwerty
5 what
6 dvorak

With this in place, my goal was to be able to run something like cat test_file | parser_concept. After a bit of searching I found the lein-exec plugin for Leiningen, and after very minor setup I was able to start iterating with input piped in from elsewhere.

The first step was to open my profiles.clj file in my ~/.lein directory. I made sure lein-exec was specified in my user plugins as so:

{:user {:plugins [[lein-exec "0.2.1"]
                  ;other plugins for lein
                 ]}}

With this in place I just put the following line at the top of my script.clj file:

#!/usr/bin/env lein exec

I then changed the permissions of script.clj file to make it executable, I was able to run the following and have my code run against the input.

cat test_input | ./script.clj

I will be posting a follow up entry outlining my next step of experimenting with “processing” each line read in as a future.

5 thoughts on “Running Clojure shell scripts in *nix environments

  1. Andreas Steffan (@deas)

    I wish the clojure folks would put the general scripting functionality right into the core distribution, so you just write one executable script where we can pull in whatever you need.

    Look at groovy to see an example in action:

    #!/usr/bin/env groovy
    @Grab(‘groupId:artifactId:version’)

    As far as I can see, all we need for clojure would be pomegranate included in the core.

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  3. Pingback: Log File parsing with Futures in Clojure « Proctor It

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