FindBin equivalent in bash

Perl has a really useful module called 'FindBin'. Using this module, one can find the actual directory of the current script and also can find the real name of the script (when the current script is just a symlink). What's the equivalent of it in bash? Answer is 'FindBin.sh'.

I wrote this bash script to imitate the behavior of both $FindBin::RealBin and $FindBin::RealScript. You can find this script here. I uses the environment variable 'PATH' to figure out the dir name and actual name of the current script.

How use it?

It's really simple! 'FindBin.sh' currently accepts 2 command line options: '-bin' and '-script'. '-bin' is equivalent to FindBin::RealBin and '-script' is to 'FindBin::RealScript'. After these commandline options, just pass the name of the current script. (which is generally stored in $0).

Example: myRealBin=`FindBin.sh -bin "$0"` 

Help?
Use the '-h' option with this script in order to know about its usage.

Happy coding!

Not all colors are showing in gnome-terminal (and xterm)!?

This incidence happened to me on my office vnc session (on 64b CentOS, kernel Version 2.6.29.4). I was in a vnc session and I typed ls --colors=always. I was expecting the output to be colorized as per the values set by 'dircolors'. But to my surprise I saw that the output was not colorized! I googled on this issue and saw some suggestions in many of the linux forums. I kept on trying each one of these solutions below:

• Setting TERM=xterm
• Setting TERM=xterm-color
• Setting force_use_color=yes
• Changing (and playing with) the values for gnome color palette.

But, none of them gave back the colors! Frustrating!
However, to my surprise, on a ssh session on the same machine, I was able to get the colors displayed! So, this definitely seemed to be an issue with the vnc session. (Indeed it was :D). I then checked the command used to create this vnc session and it was created with '-depth 8' (8bpp, bits per pixel). Somehow, gnome-terminal (as well as xterm) do not display (multiple) colors when you are in an 8bpp vnc session. But you know, even in that situation (8bpp), 'konsole' was able to display the colors!

By now, you'd have figured out the solution ;).
Yes! the solution is to start a vnc session using the option '-depth 24' to the command 'vncserver'.

Happy coding!

PS: If you set the depth to be 24bpp, then the bandwidth consumption of vnc viewer would increase. A solution for that is to set your vnc viewer to work with lesser colors. EG: 'Low (64 colors)'.