A command-line utility to manage the /etc/hosts file.

host-manager

#!/bin/bash
# Idea and interface taken from https://github.com/macmade/host-manager

path="/etc/hosts"
addusage="Usage: `basename $0` -add host address"
remusage="Usage: `basename $0` -remove host"
case "$1" in
-add)
  if [ $# -eq 3 ]; then
    if [[ -n $(grep "^$3.*[^A-Za-z0-9\.]$2$" ${path}) ]]; then
      echo "Duplicate address/host combination, ${path} unchanged."
    else
      printf "$3\t$2\n" >> ${path}
    fi
  else
    echo $addusage;
  fi 
  ;;
-remove)
  if [ $# -eq 2 ]; then
    sed -i '' -e "s/^[^#].*[^A-Za-z0-9\.]$2$//g" -e "/^$/ d" ${path}
  else
    echo $remusage;
  fi 
  ;;
*)
  echo $addusage;
  echo $remusage;
esac

Good stuff, will definitely find use for this. Would getopt be overkill here though, if only for the sake of brevity on the CLI?

@jdp Interesting, I didn't know getopts was also a bash thing (I only knew about the C lib). I have just looked into it, but it does indeed seem like overkill because we never use more than one dash-argument at once, and those don't really have values, more like positional parameters.

I'm not against it, but I don't see a more elegant way to parse arguments right now (we could use local variables to increase readability, which I have omitted of brevity, probably a wrong move on my account)