Unix Tricks

by dedalus • 12 years ago

361 162 12 years ago

voltagex_2• 12 years ago

I wonder if I can convince the author of this to put it up in a Git repo so everyone can contribute. It probably needs the tiny URLs removed (IME, they're more likely to break than the original site)

samsaga2• 12 years ago

It's amazing how many years I've been using bash and I still have things to discover.

Ctrl-x Ctrl-e nice tip!

tomsthumb• 12 years ago

`man readline` and `man bash` alike blow my mind every time I pop them open.

pling3• 12 years ago

I still prefer "sh" on BSD (particularly OpenBSD). It doesn't have as many knobs to turn nor as many surprises.

currysausage2• 12 years ago

sh, the Bourne shell mode of pdksh? Isn't that a little too limited? pdksh (/bin/ksh) though is great, yes.

I'm in general a big fan of the OpenBSD userland: straightforward and very, very well-documented. Real manpages, no religious "The full documentation for xyz is maintained as a TeXinfo manual" crap.

A well-conceived featureset and good docs are key to properly learning a platform. OpenBSD taught me a lot about Unix. If you later realize that Bash has some feature that you actually need, you can still install it.

raju2• 12 years ago

In bash fc will open your $EDITOR with the last command you just typed. Just like Ctrl-x Ctrl-e but you don't need a command in place to edit.

atoponce• 12 years ago

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

rzimmerman• 12 years ago

Ctrl-R is by far the most useful one for me.

cmatteri• 12 years ago

The article doesn't say, so it's worth mentioning that you can type ctrl-R multiple times to search further back into command history.

aatos2• 12 years ago

It doesn't mention either that you can search to the other direction by pressing ctrl-s (usually it also sends the stop signal which should be removed by "stty -ixon"). Very useful if you go past the entry you are looking for.

danielweber6• 12 years ago

I use C-r constantly. But sometimes I need to find a command, and then edit it before running it. What is the proper way to exit "search mode" and go into the normal "edit" mode?

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

Ctrl-P autocompletes from your history too. It works like Ctrl-R but after you've already started typing, if you see what I mean.

This might be a zsh thing though.

uulbiy• 12 years ago

Ctrl-p in emacs takes you to the previous line. Since readline uses emcs-style notation by default, Ctrl-p takes you to the previous command in history (and Ctrl-n to the next). I don't know about zsh though.

Also, other emacs keys work like back: ctrl-b, meta-b, forward: ctrl-f, meta-f, start of line: ctrl-a, end of line: ctrl-e etc.

buerkle• 12 years ago

I like this in my ~/.inputrc

  "\e[A":history-search-backward
  "\e[B":history-search-forward

Type a few characters and hitting the arrow keys will show only commands that match those first few characters.

cellover• 12 years ago

Very interesting resource! It's amazing to see how after 10 years of using command line that you can learn new tricks. Every single day!

nemasu2• 12 years ago

One to add: Unfreezing terminal after pressing Ctrl+S by accident. Press Ctrl-Q.

derefr• 12 years ago

Or drop a `stty -ixon` into your .bash_profile to never have that problem again.

danielweber6• 12 years ago

One that I needed to use a lot in the old days, and still occasionally need:

If your font is all messed up, echo C-v C-o. C-v puts you into a literal mode, and C-o gets you back into the normal character set. (You probably got there by emitting a C-p at some point.)

mkesper• 12 years ago

I always used 'reset' for that.

ing33k• 12 years ago

one more resource http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/11/50-linux-commands/

sigsergv• 12 years ago

And for python3:

python3 -m http.server 8080

TimWolla• 12 years ago

You might want to try out the more modern fish shell as well: http://fishshell.com/ It makes history searching even easier.

bshimmin2• 12 years ago

I love fish and have happily been using it for years. Every time it comes up here, though, someone inevitably will complain about compatibility - and I will admit that RVM, for instance, has definitely caused me problems with fish in the past. I guess it depends quite a lot on your particular usage and requirements.

robin_reala3• 12 years ago

I never got RVM working with fish; unsurprising, seeing as it’s 20k lines of bash. rbenv works well though (with one additional conf line), and chruby was working on support last time I checked.

gitaarik• 12 years ago

I like the autocompletion of fish, isn't there a way to get this in bash?

nemasu2• 12 years ago

I actually bookmarked a similar page a little while ago, super useful: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/21rm3o/what_is_a_usef...

curiousHacker• 12 years ago

You know what I hate? My history isn't aggregated in real time across all my Mac OS X terminal windows.

You know what else I hate? Typing in long commands in the Mac OS X terminal and then them wrapping weirdly. Especially when I hit the up arrow to go back in my terminal history.

ibotty• 12 years ago

My history isn't aggregated in real time across all my Mac OS X terminal windows.

zsh has `setopt inc_append_history` and `setopt share_history`. i am sure bash has something similar.

Tiksi• 12 years ago

Here you go, just throw it in your .bashrc:

  shopt -s histappend
  export HISTSIZE=100000
  export HISTFILESIZE=100000
  export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:erasedups
  export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a;history -c;history -r;$PROMPT_COMMAND"

I wish I could give credit to where I originally found this but it was ages ago.

mtford• 12 years ago

Many thanks for this! This has been a thorn in my side for a while but never got round to doing anything about it...

grimgrin3• 12 years ago

Don't you want HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth ?

gknoy2• 12 years ago

I've been using `history -a`, but what do `history -c` and `history -r` do?

It looks like it clears your shell's history, and then re-populates it from the .bash_history file?

JoeAcchino• 12 years ago

You know what else I hate? Typing in long commands in the Mac OS X terminal and then them wrapping weirdly.

I solved this by adding the following line in my ~/.bashrc

  shopt -s checkwinsize

Never tried on Mac OS X though, so I don't know if it works.

diggan2• 12 years ago

    > You know what else I hate? Typing in long commands in the Mac OS X terminal and then them wrapping weirdly.

Yeah, keeping ctrl pressed in and pressing x followed by e (CTRL + x e) will open up the current line in $EDITOR and when you edit and save, replaces the current line with what you entered in your editor. Really a killer feature.

vram223• 12 years ago

In Linux with bash (and probably other shells that are bash-compatible), you can use vi to edit any of the commands in your command history, and then execute the edited version.

Do this at the command prompt, or once in your ~/.bash_profile to make it permanent:

set -o vi

After that, you can search for any of the commands in your history, edit it, and then execute the edited command, by doing this:

At the prompt, type Esc once to get into vi command mode. Then you can press the k key repeatedly to scroll up through the command history, or (often easier) use the ? (search backward) vi command to search for a pattern to find a specific command. Once found, press v to edit it in a temp file. Then when you save and quit, the edited command gets executed.

The same technique works with emacs as the editor instead of vi, if you don't give the 'set -o vi' command, because the default editor for command line history is emacs. Also, if you have run 'set -o vi', you can switch the editor for commands back to emacs with 'set -o emacs'.

Spiritus• 12 years ago

You know what else I hate? Typing in long commands in the Mac OS X terminal and then them wrapping weirdly.

Are you escaping your color codes in PS1 correctly?

Bad:

    PS1="\033[1;32m \w \033[m $"

Good (notice the extra \[ and \]):

    PS1="\[\033[1;32m\] \w \[\033[m\] $"

raju2• 12 years ago

This. Right Here. For the longest time I could not figure out why my Ctrl-r (history) was so messed up.

tambourine_man• 12 years ago

Mine seems escaped as hell, but still gets wrapped. Anything I'm missing?

edit: couldn't get UTF-8 branch symbol to be properly displayed here, but this is how it looks:

http://i.imgur.com/zuq24gV.png?1

  function fancyPrompt {

   local bgBlue="\[\033[48;5;31m\]"
   local fgBlue="\[\033[38;5;31m\]"

   local fgWhite="\[\033[38;5;231m\]"

   local bgDarkBlue="\[\033[48;5;24m\]"
   local fgDarkBlue="\[\033[38;5;24m\]"

   local bgDarkGray="\[\033[48;5;237m\]"
   local bgLightGray="\[\033[48;5;245m\]"
   local fgLightGray="\[\033[38;5;245m\]"
   local colorClear="\[\033[0m"

   local branch
   local branch_symbol="\[\] "

   if branch=$( { git symbolic-ref --quiet HEAD || git rev-parse --short HEAD; } 2>/dev/null ); then
   	branch=${branch##*/}
   	export PS1="${bgBlue}${fgWhite}\h${colorClear}${fgBlue}${bgDarkBlue}\[\] ${fgWhite}\w${bgLightGray}${fgDarkBlue}\[\] ${fgWhite}${branch_symbol}${branch}${fgLightGray}${bgDarkGray}\[\] ${colorClear}"
   else
   	export PS1="${bgBlue}${fgWhite}\h${colorClear}${fgBlue}${bgDarkBlue}\[\] ${fgWhite}\w${bgDarkGray}${fgDarkBlue}\[\] ${colorClear}"
   fi

 }

antocv2• 12 years ago

Typing in long commands in the Mac OS X terminal and then them wrapping weirdly.

For all people who dont use Mac OS X:

This happens because your PS1 is wrongly set and bash cant calculate correctly the length left of your line. Try it out, by going back to default with no colors and crap and see how long it goes.

For mac os x users. The above wont help, dont even try it.

mitchty• 12 years ago

I found the solution to bash problems was to move to zsh. I did that almost 10 years ago and haven't regretted the decision.

jdong• 12 years ago

You should just move to zsh that does this natively and in a clean manner.

naner• 12 years ago

You know what I hate? My history isn't aggregated in real time across all my Mac OS X terminal windows.

I used to feel this way. Then one day I figured out how to enable this in Bash. Resulted in a confusing mess. Turns out you most likely want terminal sessions to be distinct until you end them.

toddkaufmann2• 12 years ago

I prefer to keep mine separate, but I always use specific terminals / screen sessions for (mostly) the same type of work (admin, specific projects, web dev, etc.) so each have their own history, as well as keeping a per-directory record.

So far over 130000 command lines (with timestamp & cwd) for past 2.5 years, just on my laptop.

chanux2• 12 years ago

Pipe to clipboard with following alias

alias clip='xsel -i --clipboard'

Get tree view of directories

alias lst='tree -L 2 $1'

Also I use za to go up in directory tree

bash https://gist.github.com/chanux/1119556 fish https://gist.github.com/chanux/9411092

wombit• 12 years ago

http://explainshell.com/

3rd3• 12 years ago

    man hier

is pretty cool. It explains the root directory structure of the system.

robert_tweed3• 12 years ago

TIL. As a long-time DOS user that often gets a bit lost on Unix systems I cannot stress how awesome it is to have found out about this!

jordigh2• 12 years ago

Wow, DOS users still exist? Which one? FreeDOS?

Back in the late 90s when I first moved to Debian from Windows, growing up with a DOS CLI made the transition far easier to me (and having some FTP exposure didn't hurt either).

danielweber6• 12 years ago

Nice to see something I've gradually learned about by gut feel summarized.

Why do some distributions use /opt a lot while others don't seem to use it at all?

mhurron• 12 years ago

Short answer would be historical reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_filesystem

"Contains locally installed software. Originated in System V, which has a package manager that installs software to this directory (one subdirectory per package)."

Solaris made extensive use of /opt, that flowed into some Linux packagers. It then fell out of favor as everyone put everything in /usr

ciupicri2• 12 years ago

Which was updated just yesterday[1].

[1] https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

international pun, hier being french for yesterday.

smorrow• 12 years ago

definitely feel like this one was more widely known in the days of printed manuals.

spopejoy• 12 years ago

The SEE ALSO for 'man hier' alerted me to 'apropos'. Unbelievable, so much emacs goodness in bash.

"apropos Regular Expressions" brings up wild stuff: re_format(7) -- posix regex docs at last!, treereg(1) (huh????).

Some serious lore in here ...

jalanb• 12 years ago

I notice j.py in that list. I forked that a wee while back, and have been enhancing it ever since:

http://www.al-got-rhythm.net/kd/

grimgrin3• 12 years ago

https://github.com/rupa/z is really nice, too. Pure bash.

fauria• 12 years ago

I would add:

    TOOLS
    ...
    * 'tree' instead of 'ls -R'
    ...

voltagex_2• 12 years ago

Which package would that be in?

chanux2• 12 years ago

tree on ubuntu

ejstronge2• 12 years ago

On Debian/Ubuntu, you can use the `apt-file` package to determine what package a file resides in. For example:

    apt-file search /bin/tree

WickyNilliams3• 12 years ago

`brew install tree` on OSX

Also this bash function from Mathias Bynen's famous dotfiles is a fantastic shortcut for colorised (and more) output from tree. https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.funct...

danielweber6• 12 years ago

- 'sort | uniq' to check for duplicate lines

sort -u

xr09• 12 years ago

j.py? The original is autojump: https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump/

grimgrin3• 12 years ago

z is a nice replacement that is purely written in bash.

https://github.com/rupa/z

k4rthik• 12 years ago

I have

for cmd in $(compgen -c); do if [[ $cmd =~ ^[0-9a-zA-Z]+$ ]]; then eval "alias $cmd?='man $cmd'"; fi; done

in my .bashrc to alias command?=man command, saves some typing to get to man pages ( which I do very often )

grkvlt• 12 years ago

Wow. I never knew about the `compgen -c` command to show bash command completions. Also from this reference [1] I found these:

    % compgen -b # built-ins
    % compgen -k # keywords
    % compgen -A function # functions
    % compgen -abckA function # everything

[1] http://www.cyberciti.biz/open-source/command-line-hacks/comp...

vram223• 12 years ago

Speaking of man pages, in earlier versions of Unix and Linux, I used to want to redirect the output of many man commands to files for later reading, e.g. if working on C, say I wanted to read 'man ioctl', 'man stdio', 'man signal', etc. But the man output had {n|t}roff formatting characters in it, for print output, which used to mess up vi. So I used to use this script I wrote, called m:

# Put this script in a directory in your PATH.

# m: pipe man output through col and save to file(s).

mkdir -p ~/man # Only creates the dir first time, including all dirs in the path.

for name: # in $* is implied

    man $name | col -bx > ~/man/$name.m

done

Do a "chmod u+x m" to be able to run it.

Then run it like this:

m ioctl stdio signal # or any other commands

Then:

pushd ~/man; view ioctl.m stdio.m signal.m; popd

to read those pages, now stripped of formatting characters.

bubblesorting• 12 years ago

For zsh:

  for cmd in $(compgen -c); do if [[ $cmd =~ ^[0-9a-zA-Z]+$ ]]; then eval "alias $cmd\?='man $cmd'"    ; fi; done

# had to escape the ? in the alias name

Cool trick :)

INTPenis• 12 years ago

I call this one sshping.

    while sleep 0.1; do nc -w 1 -z host 22; done

Useful when waiting for systems to boot.

lloeki4• 12 years ago

Add this line to (vixie) cron:

    @reboot /bin/date | /usr/bin/mail -s "$(/bin/hostname) booted" root@example.com

If you don't want to configure postfix as a smarthost (which is not that hard and recommended if only to have mail queued for retry), use ssmtp.

stevekemp• 12 years ago

      $ until-success ssh ...

If you have my sysadmin-utils installed:

https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util

AssertFailure• 12 years ago

Instead of using netcat when tunneling SSH through another machine like this:

    ProxyCommand ssh -T host1 'nc %h %p'

one should use this instead:

    ProxyCommand ssh -W %h:%p host1

aseidl• 12 years ago

The only problem with -W is that it is not available everywhere yet: RHEL6 defaults to OpenSSH 5.3, while -W was introduced in 5.4. Thankfully EL7 comes with OpenSSH 6.4 (and a kernel newer than 2.6.32!).

lloeki4• 12 years ago

Instead of

    ssh -R 12345:localhost:22 server.com "sleep 1000; exit"

use

    ssh -R 12345:localhost:22 -n server.com

The -n flag tells ssh to only make a connection, without ever running a shell. This means it even works when you don't have shell access (say, with a command= entry in .authorized_keys).

Also, I cannot recommend envoy enough in lieu of ssh-agent, if you're not using a GUI ssh agent already (e.g OSX keychain or GNOME keyring)

Last, I guarantee you don't want "$@" in those aliases, but either "$*" or $@ (certainly the latter).

zipperhead• 12 years ago

I usually visit these threads knowing that I will pick up something useful to add to the toolbox... thank you for 'envoy' - I think it will streamline my ssh key management.

ciupicri2• 12 years ago

I think you meant -N, not -n. From the man page[1]:

     -N      Do not execute a remote command.  This is useful for just for‐
             warding ports (protocol version 2 only).

     -n      Redirects stdin from /dev/null (actually, prevents reading from
             stdin).  This must be used when ssh is run in the background.

[1]: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ssh&sektion=1

valarauca13• 12 years ago

Its implied on the list but not mentioned specifically.

!!

will be substituted with the last command you typed. So if your somebody like me who frequently types

     $ apt-get update
     Could not lock yada yada are you root?
     $ sudo apt-get update

instead you can type

     $ apt-get update
     $ sudo !!

cheepin• 12 years ago

What I love about this is that if you up-arrow through your past commands, the "sudo !!" shows up as "sudo apt-get update"

valarauca13• 12 years ago

Bash substitutions are done prior to execution so your history stays intact. Older open source projects are just amazing for how complete their feature set is.

vehementi• 12 years ago

I named my cat sudo bangbang

a3_nm• 12 years ago

It always feels more logical to me to just type "Ctrl-P Ctrl-A sudo" (previous history line, beginning of line, add missing sudo) than typing "sudo !!" or "sudo !!<tab>" if you need to edit the substitution.

Same thing for the last argument, it's easily edited if you know the right shortcuts: Ctrl-P Alt-B Ctrl-U. (Works for bash, for zsh you need http://stackoverflow.com/q/3483604/414272). That said, I didn't know about Alt-.

Tepix• 12 years ago

Missing trick:

In bash, "ESC" then "." fetches the last parameter of the previous command. It's invaluable (same as typing "!$" but you get to see and edit it)

akirk2• 12 years ago

You can get any parameter of the previous command by using "Esc, <number>, Esc, .". If you repeat pressing "Esc, ." you get the n-th parameter from the command before the previous one, etc.

More details in this Stackoverflow answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4010170/578588

lloeki4• 12 years ago

It's actually Meta, emulated by an ESC character by the terminal. OSX tip: check "use Option as Meta" in Terminal's preferences, and you can keep Option pressed while you mash ".".

akirk2• 12 years ago

Which is fine if you never need to generate characters using the Option key. For example on a German keyboard you need the Option key to write { or }.

Alupis• 12 years ago

There are some great tips/tricks in this document. Too bad it's not in Markdown or something easier on the eyes!

grmarcil• 12 years ago

Markdown-ified version: http://www.notehub.org/kywfm

Editing password is hackernews if anyone wants to tune up the markdown.

nkouevda• 12 years ago

You can also use the following options to see and edit all expansions before running a command:

    shopt -s histverify histreedit

BoppreH• 12 years ago

I prefer `alt+.`, which does the same thing without having to reach for the ESC key.

olefoo• 12 years ago

I use `!:p` to the same effect. Which has the benefit that you can insert a history number between the bang! and the colon: ( set PS1 to include the command number if you do this a lot ).

scarygliders2• 12 years ago

Another one:

Use dcfldd instead of dd if you want to see how far your dd operation is progressing...

dcfldd if=[infile] of=[outfile] sizeprobe=if

So. Much. Better.

dcfldd also has many other useful options - read the man pages - and note that you'll have to install it from your linux distro's package repo beforehand.

sushimako• 12 years ago

You can also send SIGUSR1 to dd for progress info. From the manpage:

  Sending a USR1 signal to a running 'dd' process makes it print I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying.

    $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null& pid=$!
    $ kill -USR1 $pid; sleep 1; kill $pid

    18335302+0 records in 18335302+0 records out 9387674624 bytes (9.4 GB) copied, 34.6279 seconds, 271 MB/s

scarygliders2• 12 years ago

Indeed you can :)

But I prefer not to have to manually keep sending that ;)

carlisle_3• 12 years ago

On OSX it's SIGINFO (29) in case anybody wondered

sneak• 12 years ago

Caution: while this works great on Linux, on OSX, a USR1 will kill dd, and a SIGINFO will get you the block counts.

qmr• 12 years ago

Just pipe dd to pv

o_____________o• 12 years ago

I was going to write a shell package/snippet manager until I discovered this:

https://github.com/ziyaddin/jean

It would be nice to get all of these .bash_profile enhancements in as packages.

I suppose it could be improved to prompt for a brew/apt install if needed.

wazoox• 12 years ago

Ctrl+r is fine when you're looking for something recent, but this one is useful when you're looking through a long list of similar commands.

    alias hist='history  | grep'

Use it like this:

    $ hist git
      9543  git add toto
      9544  git commit
      9545  git log
      9546  git log
      9548  git add -A
      9549  git commit
      9550  git log
      9633  git pull
      9955  cd dev/git
      9957  git grep copyof
      9958  git grep copyof
      9959  git pull

By the way, do you know you can call back the 9633rd command in the history with "!9633"?

hrrsn• 12 years ago

Wow, this is great. All too commonly I do cat ~/.bash_history|grep, but this is way easier. Thanks!

WickyNilliams3• 12 years ago

I use this all the time. In fact it was one of the first aliases i made when i switched to a UNIX system. Though I named mine `greph` (for grep history). Absolutely invaluable

jlas• 12 years ago

Along with the !! function you can reference the last call of a specific command like so:

    !<cmd>

e.g. sometimes I forget the "ln -s" order of arguments (to which it gives me an error), so I follow it up with:

    ln -s !ln:3 !ln:2

kneth• 12 years ago

Now and then I reread a chapter of "Classic Shell Scripting" (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596005955.do) - probably the best book on shell script I know.

dorfsmay2• 12 years ago

In bash, 'ctrl-r' searches your command history

No! In emacs ctrl-r searches your command history. It happens that bash use emacs mode by default. All other emacs basic commands work too: ctrl-p, ctrl-n, ctrl-f etc...

If you are a vim user, and especially if you love venting how much you hate emacs, then please add this to your bashrc:

set -o vi

and now you can use vim command instead of emacs.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

'ctrl-r' is reverse-i-search in vi mode as well.

dventimi• 12 years ago

'ctrl-r' is bound to isearch-backward in my Emacs.

'meta-r' is bound to comint-history-isearch-backward-regexp

dorfsmay2• 12 years ago

'htop' instead of 'top'

meh, I don't like htop. "atop" on the other hand!!!

marcosscriven• 12 years ago

A really handy one a colleague showed me yesterday was the /dev/fd/0|1|2 files, which are stdin/out/err respectively. Means you can use that file for utils that expect a file only.

E.g echo "This would be contents of file" | someCommand /dev/fd/0

LukeShu• 12 years ago

These are also available as /dev/std{in,out,err}; the names of which are a little more self documenting :)

    $ ls -l /dev/fd /dev/std* | column -t
    lrwxrwxrwx  1  root  root  13  Jun  27  16:32  /dev/fd      ->  /proc/self/fd
    lrwxrwxrwx  1  root  root  15  Jun  27  16:32  /dev/stderr  ->  /proc/self/fd/2
    lrwxrwxrwx  1  root  root  15  Jun  27  16:32  /dev/stdin   ->  /proc/self/fd/0
    lrwxrwxrwx  1  root  root  15  Jun  27  16:32  /dev/stdout  ->  /proc/self/fd/1

You can even access the file descriptors of other processes with /proc/${pid}/fd/; which is handy for (say) un-deleting a file that a process still has open.

Another handy one is "process substitution" which lets you do the same thing with multiple streams by creating new file descriptors, and automatically turning them into /dev/fd/* paths:

    someCommand <(echo "contents of file 1") <(echo "contents of file 2")

which is somewhat explained by:

    $ echo someCommand <(echo "contents of file 1") <(echo "contents of file 2")
    someCommand /dev/fd/63 /dev/fd/62

toddkaufmann2• 12 years ago

"process substitution" is one of the new useful things I learned this year (switched to bash from csh over 20 years ago).

/proc/${pid}/fd/ is very useful for forensic purposes when you find some malware running that deleted itself and/or config files but still has a handle open to them.

meapix• 12 years ago

biftek• 12 years ago

zsh has a simple builtin `r` (which is just an alias for `fc -e -`). It lets you edit the previous command with search and replace. I use it for brew and git a lot.

  $ brew info rust
  $ r fo=stal

Zenst4• 12 years ago

stty - sane

Very handy if you do something silly like cat a binary file without piping it into strings -a

This restores the terminal settings and sanity restored. Note you will often find yourself typing without seeing anything, least until you enter and execute the sane.

Also asvise the following usage ctrl+c a couple of times to clear anything out of the input buffer queued up. stty -sane all good from here onwards and good time to play with od and remember the strings -a pipe next time.

currysausage2• 12 years ago

I found Ctrl-O (execute current command from history and edit the next one) to be invaluable.

Ctrl-V: type next input literally (e.g. Ctrl-V [Tab] if you don't want [Tab] to autocomplete).

Alt-#: Prefix current line with "#" (don't execute it) and put it into history for later use.

I'm sometimes surprised how many people don't know these: Ctrl-U/K: kill line before/after cursor.

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

I used to be excited about this, now I found it shallow. Better unix tip => http://www.confreaks.com/videos/615-cascadiaruby2011-the-uni...

WickyNilliams3• 12 years ago

A personal favourite of mine is aliasing common cd operations.

    alias ..="cd .."
    alias ...="cd ../.."
    # etc

and of course `cd -` to jump to previous directory

andrey-p• 12 years ago

I love these, there's too much to process but I always get to learn at least one ridiculously useful thing. Today's was vim's `:set spell`.

gowan• 12 years ago

Send a command to display 1.

`xterm -display :1 -e <command>`

This is useful when running automated tests on top of vnc.

pmontra• 12 years ago

I suggest bashmarks http://www.huyng.com/projects/bashmarks/ to bookmark directories and jump there with a quick command. I also like to alias ..="cd .." and alias ...="cd ../.." to quickly navigate up.

thln666• 12 years ago

"- Compile your own version of 'screen' from the git sources. Most versions have a slow scrolling on a vertical split or even no vertical split at all"

Or you could just use tmux which afaict is superior to screen in almost every way. http://tmux.sourceforge.net/

aceperry• 12 years ago

Don't know where to start? SMB is usually better than NFS for most cases.

Not sure why he feels SMB is better, because in my experience, NFS usually works more smoothly and is easier to setup than SMB. But then, I don't usually use windows.

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