install

spark is a shell script, so drop it somewhere and make sure it's added to your $PATH. It's helpful if you have a super-neat collection of dotfiles, like mine.

usage

Just run spark and pass it a list of numbers (comma-delimited, spaces, whatever you'd like). It's designed to be used in conjunction with other scripts that can output in that format.

spark 0 30 55 80 33 150
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Invoke help with spark -h.

cooler usage

There's a lot of stuff you can do.

Number of commits to the github/github Git repository, by author:

› git shortlog -s |
      cut -f1 |
      tr "\n" ',' |
      sed 's/ //g' |
      spark
  ▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▃▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▁▁▅▁▂▁▁▁▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁

Magnitude of earthquakes over 1.0 in the last 24 hours:

› curl http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/eqs1day-M1.txt --silent |
  sed '1d' |
  cut -d, -f9 |
  tr "\n" ',' |
  sed 's/ //g' |
  spark
  ▅▆▂▃▂▂▂▅▂▂▅▇▂▂▂▃▆▆▆▅▃▂▂▂▁▂▂▆▁▃▂▂▂▂▃▂▆▂▂▂▁▂▂▃▂▂▃▂▂▃▂▂▁▂▂▅▂▂▆▆▅▃▆

Code visualization. The number of characters of spark itself, by line, ignoring empty lines:

› awk '{ print length($0) }' spark |
  grep -Ev 0 |
  tr "\n" ',' |
  spark
  ▁▁▁▁▅▁▇▁▁▅▁▁▁▁▁▂▂▁▃▃▁▁▃▁▃▁▂▁▁▂▂▅▂▃▂▃▃▁▆▃▃▃▁▇▁▁▂▂▂▇▅▁▂▂▁▇▁▃▁▇▁▂▁▇▁▁▆▂▁▇▁▂▁▁▂▅▁▂▁▆▇▇▂▁▂▁▁▁▂▂▁▅▁▂▁▁▃▁▃▁▁▁▃▂▂▂▁▁▅▂▁▁▁▁▂▂▁▁▁▂▂

Since it's just a shell script, you could pop it in your prompt, too:

ruby-1.8.7-p334 in spark/ on master with history: ▂▅▇▂
›

wicked cool usage

Sounds like a wiki is a great place to collect all of your wicked cool usage for spark.

todo

so hint hint hint if you're looking for something to hack on.

Speedup. It's a little more sluggish than it should be since we're doing a few unnecessary loops.
I'd like to constrain character widths with a -w switch.
POSIX-compliant. I cheated with some bash functions, but I'd like to get down to basics and just do something ultimately portable for everyone.

▇▁ ⟦⟧ ▇▁

This is a @holman joint.