Shell Productivity Tips and Tricks

Post by usefulcat » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

    $ sed -i '/secret-command/d' $HISTFILE  # deletion of history line containing 'secret-command'

Post by saagarjha » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

sigjuice wrote: post #60

kubanczyk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except with CDPATH the `cd` is usually not an alias. Even `/usr/bin/cd` is aware of CDPATH. It's a bug in the script, just like reacting badly to $IFS or $LANG.

What is /usr/bin/cd for? cd is supposed to be a shell built-in, because running /usr/bin/cd will make another process and that cannot change the current working directory of the shell you are in. EDIT: $ cat /usr/bin/cd #!/usr/bin/sh builtin cd "$@"

  $ cat /usr/bin/cd
  #!/bin/sh
  # $FreeBSD: src/usr.bin/alias/generic.sh,v 1.2 2005/10/24 22:32:19 cperciva Exp $
  # This file is in the public domain.
  builtin `echo ${0##*/} | tr \[:upper:] \[:lower:]` ${1+"$@"}

Post by seemslegit » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

jabl wrote: post #58

seemslegit wrote: post #47

Best shell productivity trick ever: don't use the shell for anything more complicated than launching executables and use a reasonably modern programming language to achieve all other tasks.

I'd love a good answer here. Shell is clunky and annoying as hell, but a "better" language like python is very verbose for typical shell stuff like process management (processes, pipes, signal handling), small text handling tasks like regex matching or string splitting. Perl is maybe the closest here, but it certainly has it's fair share of annoyances, and I more or less dropped perl for python decades ago and don't…

Post by __Joker » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

alufers wrote: post #27

The single best shell productivity tip for me was to use z: https://github.com/rupa/z It automatically makes a list of directories you frequently use in your shell and if you type `z a-small-substring-of-the-directory-path` it does a cd to that directory. (e.g. I type `z and` and it changes my current directory to $HOME/Work/Projects/android`). Saved me tons of typing.

Post by ryangittins » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

arendtio wrote: post #64

Today, was actually the first time that I used the vim time travel feature. I noticed that I had deleted a line by accident somewhen during the last few minutes. So I typed :earlier 5m and copied the line. Afterward, I typed :later 5m and was back where I started, ready to paste the missing line :-)

  :later 8h