Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
blog.hofstede.it
Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
1–10 of 287 posts
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#2Not a fan of the LLM-flavoured headings, and the tips seem like a real mixed bag (and it'd be nice to give credit specifically to the readline library where appropriate as opposed to the shell), but there are definitely a few things in here I'll have to play around with.
One thing I dislike about brace expansions is that they don't play nicely with tab completion. I'd rather have easy ways to e.g. duplicate the last token (including escaped/quoted spaces), and delete a filename suffix. And, while I'm on that topic, expand variables and `~` immediately (instead of after pressing enter).
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#3My favourite shell trick is to comment my code:
$ some_long_command -with -args -easily -forgotten # thatspecialthing
$ CTRL-R
$ some_long_command -with -args -easily -forgotten # thatspecialthing
$ history | grep "\#"
Makes for a definite return of sanity ..
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#4Never heard of instant truncate, nor `fc`, nor `Esc .`
Quite a few useful ones
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#5My favourite shell trick is to comment my code: $ some_long_command -with -args -easily -forgotten # thatspecialthing ... Some weeks later .. $ CTRL-R .. finds: $ some_long_command -with -args -easily -forgotten # thatspecialthing Need to see all the special things you've done this week/whenever? $ history | grep "\#" ... Makes for a definite return of sanity ..
omg
>$ CTRL-R
I could kiss you.. this alone is amazing!
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#6A much larger base for ksh (as a pdksh descendent) is Android. OpenBSD is a tiny community in comparison, although Android has acquired code directly from OpenBSD, notably the C library.
The vi editing mode is always present in ksh, but is optional in dash. If present, the POSIX standard requires that "set -o vi" enable this mode, although other methods to enable it are not prohibited (such as inputrc for bash/readline), and as such is a "universal trick."
The article is relying on some Emacs mode, which is not POSIX.
$_ is not POSIX if I remember correctly.
History in vi mode is easier, just escape, then forward slash (or question mark) and the search term (regex?), then either "n" or "N" to search the direction or its reverse.
I've seen a lot of people who don't like vi mode, but its presence is the most deeply standardized.
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#7My favourite shell trick is to comment my code: $ some_long_command -with -args -easily -forgotten # thatspecialthing ... Some weeks later .. $ CTRL-R .. finds: $ some_long_command -with -args -easily -forgotten # thatspecialthing Need to see all the special things you've done this week/whenever? $ history | grep "\#" ... Makes for a definite return of sanity ..
omg >$ CTRL-R I could kiss you.. this alone is amazing!
Yes indeed, it is very fun to discover this if you don't know it already, it expands your understanding of your shell life immensely, doesn't it?
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#8CTRL + W usually deletes everything until the previous whitespace, so it would delete the whole '/var/log/nginx/' string in OP's example. Alt + backspace usually deletes until it encounters a non-alphanumeric character.
Be careful working CTRL + W into muscle memory though, I've lost count of how many browser tabs I've closed by accident...
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#9> The “Works (Almost) Everywhere” Club
> The Backspace Replacements
Also known as "emacs editing mode". Funnily enough, what POSIX mandates is the support for "vi editing mode" which, to my knowledge, almost nobody ever uses. But it's there in most shells, and you can enable it with "set -o vi" in e.g. bash.
Re: Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
#10With ctrl+r, if you press it twice, it will autofill the search with whatever you last searched for. pressing it more will go back through the history. Been using that a lot recently when doing docker stuff. ctrl+r, type the container name, keep going until I get the compose build command. ctrl+r, ctrl+r, repeat until the log command. Then I can just mash ctrl+r to get the build and log commands. Ctrl+r is your friend. ctrl+r