EDITOR variable as a script

When you want to automate an interactive session

I’ve decided I’m going to start writing again, even small things.

This week I was trying to create a Kubernetes cluster using Kops. In the end it didn’t work (mainly because it uses a Classic LoadBalancer and we don’t have public IPs in that VPC)

But while I was working with it, I was making use of kops edit and that opened a new editor (vim in my case) so that I can tweak the configuration (there were no arguments for what I was trying to do).

Doing the same thing all over again is tedious, so I decided to automate it. It turns out kops edit triggers the content of the variable EDITOR. So if EDITOR is vim, it will trigger vim, if it nano, it will trigger nano. If it is a shell script that automates the change…

So yes, I created a script, and low and behold, the script was triggered.

Two small caveats, though:

  • The script needs to have execution permissions (chmod 755)
  • The script needs to have the usual shebang (i.e. it needs to start with #!/bin/bash or whatever)

And that’s it.