Add crontab syntax highlighting despite only 4K downloads on packagecontrol.io

[KaKi87]

Hello,

I would like to request an exception to the 10,000 downloads on packagecontrol.io syntax request rule for Crontab (which has 4K downloads there) because it is Linux's task scheduler.

Then, it would be usable with crontab -l | bat -l crontab.

Thanks

[keith-hall]

I would agree to this exemption. It would be nice if the language hint would be unnecessary to help it be more discoverable that bat supports it but I guess that is unrealistic.

[KaKi87]

Maybe a child pipe process can get the ID of the parent pipe process 🤷

[sharkdp]

I had that some thought years ago (and asked this question on S.E.: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405485/name-of-the-process-on-the-other-end-of-a-unix-pipe). There is a way to do that. I even wrote a Rust program ("magic") back than to demonstrate this. You can call it with cmd1 | magic | cmd2, and it will find out the names of cmd1 and cmd2. For example:

▶ sleep 1 | magic | sleep 2
sleep 1 | magic | sleep 2

Unfortunately, this does not work for most practical use cases. It also doesn't work for crontab -l. The reason is that typically, if cmd1/2 is reasonably fast, it will have finished until you can start scanning the /proc directory.

[KaKi87]

Hello,
Any news on adding crontab syntax coloration ?
Thanks

[keith-hall]

We haven't got round to it yet, but there's nothing to stop you creating a PR: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/blob/master/doc/assets.md#adding-new-builtin-languages-for-syntax-highlighting

[KaKi87]

No thanks my head blows past the two first steps 😅

[keith-hall]

#2509