41–50 of 85 posts
I worked in a campus bookstore with an old terminal system to access the inventory database. It was a simple text interface. What I loved about it was that the commands to navigate were quick to learn (key was first chars in command) and the response time was instant. So you could jump to any part of the system with a few keystrokes ingrained in muscle memory.
The combination of mosh and screen has been a big productivity booster for me. The shell alias server1='mosh root@server1 -- screen -xRR -D' keeps the connection forever even if I change networks. The only pity is that mosh breaks compatibility with earlier versions once in a while.
Maybe a good command line user interface is one you don't notice nor remember. It just work smoothly. So I will start with cat.
Nearly everything that packs or unpacks stuff. tar, gunzip, and else. I can never remember if they are going to unpack everything into a subdirectory or spill everything into my home, and conversely I never know if after zipping there's gonna be a directory inside or not. Luckily dtrx and atool do the thing you want most of the time. From the time I was a teen I think I remember that mount was difficult to use, and m…
Nearly everything that packs or unpacks stuff. tar, gunzip, and else. I can never remember if they are going to unpack everything into a subdirectory or spill everything into my home, and conversely I never know if after zipping there's gonna be a directory inside or not. Luckily dtrx and atool do the thing you want most of the time. From the time I was a teen I think I remember that mount was difficult to use, and m…
Long ago someone taught me this memory trick for tar: imagine an angry German stereotype saying “eXtract Ze Vucking File”, thus -xzvf. No idea what it stands for but it does what I need most of the time.
You can leave off the 'z' if it's a tar without compression. If it's compressed, the extension is usually tgz, tar.Z, bz2, or something else other than tar.
You can leave off the 'v' if you don't want to see a list of which files are being added or extracted.
Not the worst (I think `tar` and `unzip` probably take the cake) but `find` is pretty atrocious IMO. The order in which you specify certain flags like `-maxdepth` relative to other option flags matters (not just relative to plain arguments, but relative to other option flags starting with `-`).
`find` is definitely one of my least favourite among the traditional Unix tools in terms of interface. `dd` is also a little weird with its syntax but at least I rarely have to use `dd`.
ˋfd` is a worthy successor of ˋfind` though.
I find it very easy to remember many terrible command line user interfaces, they are already mentioned in the discussion, but very hard to name a single great one. Maybe a good command line user interface is one you don't notice nor remember. It just work smoothly. So I will start with cat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
`find` is definitely one of my least favourite among the traditional Unix tools in terms of interface. `dd` is also a little weird with its syntax but at least I rarely have to use `dd`.
I don’t know, once you take the time to learn ˋfind` it’s ok. You always use mostly the same flags anyway. ˋfd` is a worthy successor of ˋfind` though.
this could apply to literally anything. my time is not infinite.
The ImageMagick utility mogrify. By default (without specifying extra command-line options) it overwrites the input files. [1] In decades of computer use, that is the only command line tool that tricked me into destroying my data because I didn't realize it works differently from all the other tools I use that don't do that. Usually, a command line utility with less options specified is relatively "safe" and you have…
> mogrify - resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. Mogrify overwrites the original image file, whereas, convert(1) writes to a different image file. The whole reason for mogrify's existence is that it overwrites the original image file.
Then it should not exist. To save one "rm", doesn't look like a good idea to me.