Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

Found a couple neat ideas that I'm going to steal--thx for sharing; but I must mention:

running foo is like ps aux | grep foo

Should probably be pgrep and pkill

bb my_command is like my_command & but it really really runs it in the background

Should probably be setsid -f or at least use the double subshell trick (ie. ((command &) &) which immediately backgrounds the process and orphans it, effectively daemonizing it)

A lot of cool ideas here, I especially like nato bar - I feel there's been a handful of occasions lately where I'm trying to read a string of letters and numbers verbally and it's been difficult. It may just be a better web app for my use case though - since it's often a phone call issue, having it on my phone would be the most beneficial.

I tend to string commands together that I use all the time into aliases in zsh. Some of my favorites:

# common ways I style ls commands 
alias lsc="ls --color"
alias lsa="ls -lha --color"
alias lsd="ls -d --color */"
alias lsall="ls -latrh --color */"

# I need cls like I need cd and ls
alias cls="clear"

# If you connect via SSH it'll ask for a fingerprint of your machine on each new client.
# I got tired of looking up and copying this command
alias fingerprint="ssh-keygen -E md5 -lf <(ssh-keyscan localhost 2>/dev/null)"

# Technically only . ~/zshrc is doing anything useful.
#The rest is
# 1) an anonymous function that echos what I'm doing
# 2) does what I said I'd do
# 3) then confirms we're still in zsh.
alias src="() { echo 'Reloading ZSH'; . ~/.zshrc; echo $0 }"

# I honestly forgot that these aren't real commands I use them so dang much.
alias home="cd ~/"
alias whichenv="echo $VIRTUAL_ENV"

What this does is it it updates homebrew, upgrades any packages that need upgrading, and then it clears the cached downloads. (Edited to take out the mkcd command as it... doesn't work.)

$ alias
alias clip='xsel --clipboard --input < '
alias cls='clear'
alias dj='cd $HOME/dev/java/keenwrite'
alias gc='git commit -a -m'
alias gp='git push'
alias rd='rmdir'

The dj alias points to whatever project has my attention. The clip alias will copy the contents of a file to the clipboard, ready for pasting.

Scripts of note:

• Bash template for user-friendly shell scripts.
• GitHub email shell script to snag a GitHub user's email address.

I'm definitely going to have steal some of these. (Both from the article, from this thread, and from the HN thread.)

Anyway, in the spirit of sharing here are some Zsh aliases and functions of my own:

alias rshare="chmod -R go=u-w"
alias runshare="chmod -R go="
alias runexec="chmod -R a-x+X"

rshare recurses through a directory tree and for each file or directory copies my user permissions, minus write access, to group and other. I usually run locked down with umask 077, so rshare makes things accessible to others. runshare revokes those perms. runexec is useful for cleaning up directory trees copied from Windows filesystems where the executable bit comes set on everything.

function go() { local i; for i ($@); do xdg-open $i; done }

I use this one constantly. It opens up a file or list of files with whatever desktop program is assigned to them. Or for directories, it shows me the contents in the desktop file browser, etc. (Regarding the name, I was using a version of this alias long before Golang existed, damnit!)

alias ec="emacsclient -n"
function cde() { local d=`emacsclient -e "(buffer-local-value 'default-directory (window-buffer))"`; cd ${~d:1:-1} }

Quick edits in Emacs via the client. I have Emacs set to launch the server on startup, and ec just tells that instance to open whatever files I give it and then immediately returns. It's useful when I'm just cding around in the terminal and want to pop a file into my Emacs window. cde kind of goes the opposite direction and tries to cd me into the directory holding the active buffer's file.

alias opng="oxipng -o max -Z -v -v"
alias toimg="pygmentize -Ofont_size=16,line_number_chars=3,font_name=Cascadia\ Mono,style=borland -o"
function pdf2png() { gs -q -dQUIET -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOPROMPT -dMaxBitmap=500000000 -dAlignToPixels=0 -dGridFitTT=2 -sDEVICE=png16m -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -r600 -dEPSCrop -dUseCropBox -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -sOutputFile=$2 $1 }

Some image utilities: opng crunches down PNG files as much as possible, toimg renders stdin or a text/source file to a syntax highlighted image, pdf2png renders the pages of a PDF to images.

alias pdiff="git --no-pager diff --no-index --patience --color=auto -U15"
function attach() { gdb --pid `ps -o pid= -C $@` ;}
function alarm() { perl -e 'alarm shift; exec @ARGV' "$@" ;}
function countdn() { local c; for c in {$1..1}; do echo -ne "  $c... \\r"; sleep 1; done }
function vbreak() { eval `resize`; echo "\033[1;95m\n"; for r in {1..3}; do for c in {1..$COLUMNS}; do echo -n \#; done; done; date; echo "\n" }
function echob() { echo "\033[1;31m$@\033[m" }

And finally a grab bag: pdiff uses Git's patience diff on two arbitrary files (which may be outside of repos), attach tries to attach the GDB debugger to a running process by name so I don't have to look up the PID, alarm takes a time in seconds and a command to run and kills the command after the time is up, countdn takes a time in seconds and gives me a little count down (useful when I want to delay or stagger the start times of some commands to run unattended), vbreak shows a honking big bold magenta divider bar with timestamp that I can't miss in the scrollback buffer, and echob just echoes some text in bold red.

I use this a lot to create a directory and enter it in one shot

mkcd() {
  mkdir $1 && cd $_
}

in skhd I have skip ahead and skip back in big and small for Kodi. Its on a different box with a screen just to my left -- so instead of moving my hands for the remote or the remapped keypad, I can use hyper + vim keys to skip ahead etc.

hyper - k : curl -s -u "username:password" -X POST http://pear:8080/jsonrpc -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"jsonrpc
":"2.0","id":1,"method":"Player.Seek","params":{"playerid":1,"value":{"step":"smallbackward"}}}

I have similar key combos to control Hue lights, too -- but that calls a proper script.

Good article, and good thread to keep an eye on!

I use the following oneliner to open a document of notes for the day:

#!/bin/bash
exec $EDITOR $HOME/docs/notes/$(date --iso-8601).txt

I'll warn that it's for GNU date and I don't know that *BSD or busybox implement --iso-8601.

I use this to browse and search my music library with fzf and play back albums using audacious:

#!/bin/bash
cd $HOME/storage/musik/shared
case "$1" in
        "") exec fzf --walker=dir --bind "enter:execute($0 play {})" ;;
        play) audacious "$2" & disown ;;
esac

The library is organized in an <artist name>/<album name> hierarchy, and I tend to listen to music in units of albums. Consequently I don't use the library features of audacious.

I also use the following script to synchronize the music library to VLC on my phone (an Iphone) using ifuse and rsync:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
mkdir ~/iphone-syncmusic
trap "rmdir ~/iphone-syncmusic" EXIT
idevicepair pair
ifuse --documents "org.videolan.vlc-ios" ~/iphone-syncmusic
rsync -Lrvu --progress --delete ~/storage/musik/shared/ ~/iphone-syncmusic/shared/
umount ~/iphone-syncmusic

I have a gitviz/gitvizl that visualizes the commit tree in the terminal with nice coloring. The regular variant just shows the head of every branch and the merges, the l suffix shows every commit.

For a Particular project or environment, usually make a cgrep (code grep) that aliases grep with exclusions for folders I don't want to search like .git, node_modules, build, dist, coverage, etc.

I wrote a program called ask that passes the rest of the line to an llm as a prompt and asks it to return a command and only a command, then offers to cool it to the clipboard. It has a few optimizations, like if you mention git/commit/merge it will include the output of git status, and if you mention a file in the current directory it will inckude the first 500kb of it. Though I guess it's not a script (go compiled binary).

I used to have a script called slackit that I could append to long running tasks to get a notification that they finished.

No idea how I missed this thread when it was originally posted, so thanks @mxuribe for commenting it to the top again :P

cpwd copies the current directory to the clipboard. Basically pwd | copy. I often use this when I’m in a directory and I want use that directory in another terminal tab; I copy it in one tab and cd to it in another. I use this once a day or so.

My version of this takes it a step further: before opening the new tab, I enter my command nt to copy the pwd into the clipboard (if pwd isn’t $HOME), but in the new tab (if it’s not a Kitty tab, which I have configured to open in the same directory by default anyways), when I enter the same nt command in my home directory, it will cd to the path, no pasting needed! Not very unixy behavior, I guess, but it’s convenient.

The code in my shell profile config:

nt () {
        default_dir="$HOME" 
        current_wd="$(pwd)" 
        if [ "$current_wd" != "$default_dir" ]
        then
                echo "$current_wd" | cb copy
        else
                cd "$(cb --no-progress paste)" || {
                        echo "Failed to change directory to pasted target dir"
                        return 1
                }
        fi
}

(cb is “my” version of the author’s copy/pasta)

I’ll probably get back later here when I have more time and edit my comment with even more useful shell script stuff that I use that isn’t mentioned in the article or comments yet.

Easily my most used and most general script is a slightly modified version of this (archive link since the original seems to be down), letting me cycle between audio devices with a keyboard shortcut.

My other most commonly used scripts are way too niche to matter here.