trevmex's tumblings

Rails one-liner to get URLs from rake routes

Earlier today I needed to get a list of URL paths that my Rails app provided, but I didn’t need all the extra cruft that you get with

rake routes

So I created a bash one-liner with sed, awk, uniq, and sort to get what I needed out of rake routes. The one liner looks like:

rake routes | sed -e "1d" -e "s,^[^/]*,,g" | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq 

Let’s look at what this is doing:

1. First we get the list of routes:

   rake routes

2. Next we pipe the result to sed, which does two things:
   1. Deletes the first line of the output:

      sed -e "1d"

   2. Then it removes every character from the beginning of each line (^) that is not a forward-slash ([^/]*) and removes it:

      -e "s,^[^/]*,,g"

3. We then pipe that result to awk which prints out only the first column of the output:

   awk '{print $1}'

4. Next we:

   sort

   the result.
5. And finally we remove duplicates with:

   uniq

Now we can copy this to an email to the client, and all we have to do is explain what the :id and (.:format) are, as opposed to sending them the raw output of rake routes with all that extra information.

Enjoy!