Favorite Unix Commands

One of my favorite aliases that wasn't listed.

alias easy_search="curl -s http://pypi.python.org/simple/ | perl -ne 'print if s/]+>//g && $.>1'|grep"

I'm a fan of using cut or sed or awk and ending it with:

  | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r | head

to get a nice top 10 whatevers in the whoosit

Check fasd, it will blow your mind, be prepared! :) Fasd (pronounced similar to "fast") is a command-line productivity booster.

I've been using this for a while, and trust me, its changed my command line workflow, and I wish, this should come as inbuilt for all POSIX shells!

Here is how it works -

If you use your shell to navigate and launch applications, fasd can help you do it more efficiently. With fasd, you can open files regardless of which directory you are in. Just with a few key strings, fasd can find a "frecent" file or directory and open it with command you specify. Below are some hypothetical situations, where you can type in the command on the left and fasd will "expand" your command into the right side. Pretty magic, huh?

  v def conf       =>     vim /some/awkward/path/to/type/default.conf
  j abc            =>     cd /hell/of/a/awkward/path/to/get/to/abcdef
  m movie          =>     mplayer /whatever/whatever/whatever/awesome_movie.mp4
  o eng paper      =>     xdg-open /you/dont/remember/where/english_paper.pdf
  vim `f rc lo`    =>     vim /etc/rc.local
  vim `f rc conf`  =>     vim /etc/rc.conf

Fasd offers quick access to files and directories for POSIX shells. It is inspired by tools like autojump, z and v. Fasd keeps track of files and directories you have accessed, so that you can quickly reference them in the command line.

The name fasd comes from the default suggested aliases f(files), a(files/directories), s(show/search/select), d(directories).

Fasd ranks files and directories by "frecency," that is, by both "frequency" and "recency." The term "frecency" was first coined by Mozilla and used in Firefox.

Here is the Link - https://github.com/clvv/fasd

You know, I never knew ctrl-p - that's a much nicer way of doing it.

Fortunately GNU tar has gotten smarter. You can do just "tar xvf" now and it will do the right thing whether the archive is compressed or not.

When creating the archive, you still have to use your favorite compression method (XZ aka LZMA, activated with J is even better, but slightly slower, than bzip).