Remembering Biff Pocoroba: Check out the key moments from his career with the Atlanta Braves.

Alright, let me tell you about this thing I worked on, called it ‘biff pocoroba’. It wasn’t anything official, just something I cooked up for myself.

Getting Started

So, I was getting tired of opening up big applications just to stash a quick command or a tiny note. You know, like an IP address or a config line I used often. Needed something faster, right there in the terminal. I thought, why not make a super simple command-line helper? Just for me. Gave it a silly name, ‘biff pocoroba’, just because.

The Process – Making it Work

I decided early on, no fancy stuff. Shell script was the way to go. Keep it simple, stupid.

• First Try: My very first version was basic. Like, really basic. I just made a script that took whatever I typed after the command and dumped it into a text file in my home directory. Something like biff pocoroba add This is my note would just append “This is my note” to a file. Dead simple.
• Finding Stuff: Okay, saving is one thing, but finding it back is key. So, I added a way to search. Leveraged good old grep. Maybe typed biff pocoroba find note and it would spit out lines with “note” in them. Worked, kinda, but the file got messy fast.
• Needing Structure: That single file approach wasn’t cutting it. Notes got jumbled. I thought, maybe I can save notes with a specific name or key? Like a simple key-value thing.
• Key-Value Idea: I changed the script. Now, I could do something like biff pocoroba save my_server_ip 192.168.1.100. The script would create a tiny file named my_server_* (just made up the extension) and put 192.168.1.100 inside it.
• Getting it Back: To retrieve it, I added a ‘get’ command. biff pocoroba get my_server_ip would just find that my_server_* file and print its content. Easy peasy.
• Seeing What I Have: Then I realized I needed a way to remember what keys I’d saved. Added a ‘list’ command. biff pocoroba list basically just listed all the .poc files in the storage directory.
• Hitting Snags: Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Ran into annoying issues with spaces in keys or notes. Bash scripting and quotes, always a fun time, right? Spent a good hour figuring out how to handle arguments properly so it wouldn’t break. Also added some very basic checks, like telling me if a key doesn’t exist when I try to ‘get’ it, instead of just failing silently.

End Result

So, after tinkering around, I ended up with this little ‘biff pocoroba’ command. It’s nothing revolutionary, honestly. It’s rough around the edges. It probably has bugs I haven’t found yet. But, it does exactly what I wanted: quickly save and recall small bits of text right from my command line without fuss.

It’s super specific to my workflow, probably useless to anyone else. But that’s the point, right? It solves my little problem. It was a fun little exercise, building a tool, however small, just for myself. That’s the story of my ‘biff pocoroba’ practice.