sed -n 2p file

    sed -n 2,4p file

There also some very niche stuff that I won't use but found funny

What's always interesting to me is how many of these I'll see and initially think, "I don't really need that." Because I'm well aware of the effect (which I'm sure has a name - I suppose it's similar to induced demand) of "make $uncommon_task much cheaper" -> "$uncommon_task becomes the basis of an entirely new workflow/skill". So I'm going to try out most of them and see what sticks!

Also: really love the style of the post. It's very clear but also includes super valuable information about how often the author actually uses each script, to get a sense ahead of time for which ones are more likely to trigger the effect described above.

A final aside about my own workflows which betrays my origins... for some of these operations and for others i occasionally need, I'll just open a browser dev tools window and use JS to do it, for example lowercasing a string :)

A password or token generator, simple or complicated random text.

Scripts to list, view and delete mail messages inside POP3 servers

n, to start Nautilus from terminal in the current directory.

lastpdf, to open the last file I printed as PDF.

lastdownload, to view the names of the n most recent files in the Downloads directory.

And many more but those are the ones that I use often and I remember without looking at ~/bin

- When I was a fresh engineer I used a pretty vanilla shell environment

- When I got a year or two of experience, I wrote tons of scripts and bash aliases and had a 1k+ line .bashrc the same as OP

- Now, as a more tenured engineer (15 years of experience), I basically just want a vanilla shell with zero distractions, aliases or scripts and use native UNIX implementations. If it's more complicated than that, I'll code it in Python or Go.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg

[2] https://pngquant.org

sed, awk, grep, and xargs along with standard utilities get you a long long way.

Otherwise, I am happy to be pulled into your discussion, Marshall McLuhan style[3] to adjudicate, for a very reasonable fee.

[1] https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

[2] https://archive.org/details/Notcon2004DannyOBrienLifehacks

[3] https://www.openculture.com/2017/05/woody-allen-gets-marshal...

The way you’re doing it trashes files sequentially, meaning you hear the trashing sound once per file and ⌘Z in the Finder will only restore the last one. You can improve that (I did it for years) but consider just using the `trash` commands which ships with macOS. Doesn’t use the Finder, so no sound and no ⌘Z, but it’s fast, official, and still allows “Put Back”.

> jsonformat takes JSON at stdin and pretty-prints it to stdout.

Why prioritise node instead of jq? The latter is considerably less code and even comes preinstalled with macOS, now.

> uuid prints a v4 UUID. I use this about once a month.

Any reason to not simply use `uuidgen`, which ships with macOS and likely your Linux distro?

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/uuidgen.1.html

Like, it's okay -- even good -- for the tools to bend to the user and not the other way around.

I have almost the same, but differently named with scratch(day), copy(xc), markdown quote(blockquote), murder, waitfor, tryna, etc.

I used to use telegram-send with a custom notification sounnd a lot for notifications from long-running scripts if I walked away from the laptop.

I used to have one called timespeak that would speak the time to me every hour or half hour.

I have go_clone that clones a repo into GOPATH which I use for organising even non-go projects long after putting go projects in GOPATH stopped being needed.

I liked writing one-offs, and I don't think it's premature optimization because I kept getting faster at it.

You can configure your shell to notify the terminal of directory changes, and then use your terminal’s “open new window” function (eg: ctrl+shift+n) to open a new window retaining the current directory.

^ (jump to the beginning)

ctrl+v (block selection)

j (move cursor down)

shift+i (bulk insert?)

type ><space>

ESC

I use this as a bookmarklet to grab the front page of the new york times (print edition). (You can also go back to any date up to like 2011)

I think they go out at like 4 am. So, day-of, note that it will fail if you're in that window before publishing.

    javascript:(()=>{let d=new Date(new Date().toLocaleString('en-US',{timeZone:'America/New_York'})),y=d.getFullYear(),m=('0'+(d.getMonth()+1)).slice(-2),g=('0'+d.getDate()).slice(-2);location.href=`https://static01.nyt.com/images/${y}/${m}/${g}/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf`})()

Anyways, my favourite alias that I use all the time is this:

    alias a='nvim ~/.zshrc && . ~/.zshrc'

  #!/bin/sh
  if test "$#" != 2
  then
      echo 'Error: unmv must have exactly 2 arguments'
      exit 1
  fi
  exec mv "$2" "$1"

I genuinely wonder, why would anyone want to use this, often?

alias ..='cd ..'

alias ...='cd ../..'

alias ....='cd ../../..'

alias .....='cd ../../../..'

alias ......='cd ../../../../..'

alias .......='cd ../../../../../..'

And you can type `rn -rf *` to see all timezones recursively. :)

  clippy image.png  # then paste into Slack, etc. as upload

  clippy -r         # copy most recent download

  pasty             # copy file in Finder, then paste actual file here

Here are some super simple ones I didn't see that I use almost every day:

cl="clear"

g="git"

h="history"

ll="ls -al"

path='echo -e ${PATH//:/\\n}'

lv="live-server"

And for common navigation:

dl="cd ~/Downloads"

dt="cd ~/Desktop"

  $ cat /usr/local/bin/awkmail
  #!/bin/gawk -f

  BEGIN { smtp="/inet/tcp/0/smtp.yourco.com/25";
  ORS="\r\n"; r=ARGV[1]; s=ARGV[2]; sbj=ARGV[3]; # /bin/awkmail to from subj < in

  print "helo " ENVIRON["HOSTNAME"]        |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j
  print "mail from:" s                     |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j
  if(match(r, ","))
  {
   split(r, z, ",")
   for(y in z) { print "rcpt to:" z[y]     |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j }
  }
  else { print "rcpt to:" r                |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j }
  print "data"                             |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j

  print "From:" s                          |& smtp;  ARGV[2] = ""   # not a file
  print "To:" r                            |& smtp;  ARGV[1] = ""   # not a file
  if(length(sbj)) { print "Subject: " sbj  |& smtp;  ARGV[3] = "" } # not a file
  print ""                                 |& smtp

  while(getline > 0) print                 |& smtp

  print "."                                |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j
  print "quit"                             |& smtp;  smtp |& getline j; print j

  close(smtp) } # /inet/protocol/local-port/remote-host/remote-port

      # ex - archive extractor
      # usage: ex <file>
      function ex() {
          if [ -f $1 ] ; then
          case $1 in
              *.tar.bz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
              *.tar.gz) tar xzf $1 ;;
              *.tar.xz) tar xf $1 ;;
              *.bz2) bunzip2 $1 ;;
              *.rar) unrar x $1 ;;
              *.gz) gunzip $1 ;;
              *.tar) tar xf $1 ;;
              *.tbz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
              *.tgz) tar xzf $1 ;;
              *.zip) unzip $1 ;;
              *.Z) uncompress $1;;
              *.7z) 7z x $1 ;;
              *) echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via ex()" ;;
          esac
          else
              echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
          fi
      }

I'm curious to hear some examples (feel like I'm missing out)

Like, I'd have to remember both `prettypath` and `sed`, and given that there's hardly any chance I'll not need `sed` in other situations, I now need to remember two commands instead of one.

On top of that `prettypath` only does s/:/\\n/ on my path, not on other strings, making its use extremely narrow. But generally doing search and replace in a string is incredibly useful, so I'd personally rather just use `sed` directly and become more comfortable with it. (Or `perl`, but the point is the same.)

As I said, that's obviously just my opinion, if loads of custom scripts/commands works for you, all the more power to you!

this fella doesn't know what "toggle" means. in this context, it means "turn off if it's currently on, or turn on if it's currently off."

this should be named `wifi cycle` instead. "cycle" is a good word for turning something off then on again.

naming things is hard, but it's not so hard that you can't use the right word. :)

    alias vz="vim ~/.zshrc && . ~/.zshrc"

    docgrep() {
      mdfind "\"$@\"" -onlyin /Users/xxxx/Notes 2> >(grep --invert-match ' \[UserQueryParser\] ' >&2) | grep -v -e '/Inactive/' | sort
    }

    anonymizeclipboard() {
      my_user_id=xxxx
      account_ids="1234567890|1234567890"  #regex
      corp_words="xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx"  #regex
      project_names="xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx"  # regex
      pii="xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx"  # regex
      hostnames="xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx|xxxx"  # regex
      # anonymize IPs
      pbpaste | sed -E -e 's/([0-9]{1,3})\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}/\1.x.x.x/g' \
      -e "s/(${corp_words}|${project_names}|${my_user_id}|${pii}|${hostnames})/xxxx/g" -e "s/(${account_ids})/1234567890/g" | pbcopy
      pbpaste
    }

    alias anon=anonymizeclipboard

Folks interested in scripting like this might like this tool I'm working on https://github.com/amterp/rad

Rad is built specifically for writing CLI scripts and is perfect for these sorts of small to medium scripts, takes a declarative approach to script arguments, and has first-class shell command integration. I basically don't write scripts in anything else anymore.

    alias mpa='mpv --no-video'

    mpa [youtube_url]

I think it needs yt-dlp installed — and reasonably up to date, since YouTube keeps breaking yt-dlp... but the updates keep fixing it :)

The Mac Shortcut at https://github.com/e-kotov/macos-shortcuts lets you select a particular area of the screen (as with Cmd-Shift-4) and copies the text out of that, allowing you to copy exactly the text you need from anywhere on your screen with one keyboard shortcut. Great for popups with unselectable text, and copying error messages from coworkers' screenshares.

The flags are for maximum compatibility (e.g. without them, some MP4s don't play in WhatsApp, or Discord on mobile, or whatever.)

    ffmp4() {
        input_file="$1"
        output_file="${input_file%.*}_sd.mp4"

        ffmpeg -i "$input_file" -c:v libx264 -crf 33 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags faststart "$output_file"

        echo "Compressed video saved as: $output_file"
    }
    
    

-> foo_sd.mp4

    fftime() {
        input_file="$1"
        output_file="${input_file%.*}_cut.mp4"
        ffmpeg -i "$input_file" -c copy -ss "$2" -to "$3" "$output_file"

        echo "Cut video saved as: $output_file"
    }

-> foo_cut.mp4

Note, fftime copies the audio and video data without re-encoding, which can be a little janky, but often works fine, and can be much (100x) faster on large files. To re-encode just remove "-c copy"

As an aside, I find most of these commands very long. I tend to use very short aliases, ideally 2 characters. I'm assuming the author uses tab most of the time, if the prefixes don't overlap beyond 3 characters it's not that bad, and maybe the history is more readable.

Even more useful is just learning the ICAO Spelling Alphabet (aka NATO Phonetic Alphabet, of which it is neither). It takes like an afternoon and is useful in many situations, even if the receiver does not know it.

https://gist.github.com/jgbrwn/7dd4b262c544f750cb0291161b2ec...

(actually avoids having to do a one liner like: for h in {1..5}; do dig +short A mail”${h}”.domain.com @1.1.1.1 )

Hmm speaking of which I need to add in support for using a specific DNS server

I set this stuff up so long ago I sort of forgot that I did it at all; it's like a standard feature. I have to remember I did it.

I tend to try to not get too used to custom "helper" scripts because I become incapacitated when working in other systems. Nevertheless, I really appreciate all these scripts if nothing else than to see what patterns other programmers pick up.

My only addition is a small `tplate` script that creates HTML, C, C++, Makefile, etc. "template" files to start a project. Kind of like a "wizard setup". e.g.

  $ tplate c
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  }

  $ cat :q
  #!/bin/bash
  echo "you're not in vim"

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    # ~/bin/,dehex

    echo "$1" | xxd -r -p

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    # ~/bin/,ht

    highlight() {
      # Foreground:
      # 30:black, 31:red, 32:green, 33:yellow, 34:blue, 35:magenta, 36:cyan

      # Background:
      # 40:black, 41:red, 42:green, 43:yellow, 44:blue, 45:magenta, 46:cyan
      escape=$(printf '\033')
      sed "s,$2,${escape}[$1m&${escape}[0m,g"
    }

    if [[ $# == 1 ]]; then
      highlight 31 $1
    elif [[ $# == 2 ]]; then
      highlight 31 $1 | highlight 32 $2
    elif [[ $# == 3 ]]; then
      highlight 31 $1 | highlight 32 $2 | highlight 35 $3
    elif [[ $# == 4 ]]; then
      highlight 31 $1 | highlight 32 $2 | highlight 35 $3 | highlight 36 $4
    fi

One thing I have found that's worth it is periodically running an aggregation on one's history and purging old ones that I don't use.

    alias v='nvim'
    alias vv='f=$(fzf --preview-window "right:50%" --preview "bat --color=always {1}"); test -n "$f" && v "$f"'
    alias vvv='f=$(rg --line-number --no-heading . | fzf -d: -n 2.. --preview-window "right:50%:+{2}" --preview "bat --color=always --highlight-line {2} {1}"); test -n "$(echo "$f" | cut -d: -f1)" && v "+$(echo "$f" | cut -d: -f2)" "$(echo "$f" | cut -d: -f1)"'

jsonformat -> jq

running -> pgrep

  # If this is an xterm set the title to the directory stack
  case "$TERM" in
  xterm*|rxvt*)
      if [ -x ~/bin/shorten-ds.pl ]; then
    PS1="\[\e]0;\$(dirs -v | ~/bin/shorten-ds.pl)\a\]$PS1"
      else
    PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:   \w\a\]$PS1"
      fi
      ;;
  \*)
      ;;
  esac

  0  /var/log/apt
  1  ~/Downloads
  2  ~

  0:apt 1:Downloads 2:~

  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  use strict;
  my @lines;
  while (<>) {
    chomp;
    s%^ (\d+)  %$1:%;
    s%:.*/([^/]+)$%:$1%;
    push @lines, $_
  }
  print join ' ', @lines;

  u() {
    if [[ $1 =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
      pushd "+$1"
    else
      pushd "$@"
    fi
  }

  o() {
    if [[ $1 =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
      popd "+$1"
    else
      popd "$@" # lazy way to cause an error
    fi
  }

E.g. cat --copy

  echo 1 2 3 | each "rm {}"

  rm 1
  rm 2
  rm 3

  echo 1 2 3 | xargs rm

  rm 1 2 3

  for i in 1 2 3; do rm $i; done

    function unix() {
      if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
        echo "Arg: $(date -r "$1")"
      fi
      echo "Now: $(date) - $(date +%s)"
    }

  $ posh /home/ramrachum/Dropbox/notes.txt
  $DX/notes.txt

I use this a lot in all of my scripts. Basically whenever any of my script prints a path, it passes it through `posh`.

    # High level examples
    run_some_command | clip
    clip > file_from_my_clipboard.txt
    
    # Copy a file's contents
    clip < file.txt

    # indent for markdown:
    $ clip|sed 's/^/    /'|clip

This sounds pretty useful!

Coincidentally, I have recently learned that Daniel Stenberg et al (of cURL fame) wrote trurl[1], a libcurl-based CLI tool for URL parsing. Its `--json` option seems to yield similar results as TFA's url, if slightly less concise because of the JSON encoding. The advantage is that recent releases of common Linux distros seem to include trurl in their repos[2].

[1]: https://curl.se/trurl/

[2]: https://pkgs.org/search/?q=trurl

[that, plus LinkHint plugin for Firefox, and i3 for WM is my way to go for a better life]

It occurred to me that it would be more useful to me in Emacs, and that might make a fun little exercise.

And that's how I discovered `M-x nato-region` was already a thing.

`alias clip="base64 | xargs -0 printf '\e]52;c;%s\007'"`

It just sends it to the client’s terminal clipboard.

`cat thing.txt | clip`

It memoizes the command passed to it.

  $ memo curl https://some-expensive.com/api/call | jq . | awk '...'

  $ memo -c curl https://some-expensive.com/api/call

  $ cat input.txt | memo -s expensive-processor | awk '...'

  $ curl https://some-expensive.com/api/call > tmpfile
  $ cat tmpfile | jq . | awk '...'

  $ memo curl https://some-expensive.com/api/call | jq . | awk '...'
  $ memo curl --data "param1=value1" https://some-expennsive.com/api/call | jq . | awk '...'

NOTE: Currently environment variables are not taken into account when hashing.

Also re: alphabet

    $ echo {a..z}
    a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

    lt () { ls --color=always -lt ${1} | head }

https://snhps.com

They're not all necessarily the most efficient/proper way to accomplish a task, but they're nice to have on hand and be able to quickly share.

Admittedly, their usefulness has been diminished a bit since the rise of LLMs, but they still come in handy from time to time.

Over time that's grown to an @foo script for every project I work on, every place I frequent that has some kind of specific setup. They are prefixed with an @ because that only rarely conflicts with anything, and tab-complete helps me remember the less frequently used ones.

The @project scripts setup the whole environment, alias the appropriate build tools and versions of those tools, prepare the correct IDE config if needed, drop me in the project's directory, etc. Some start a VPN connection because some of my clients only have git access over VPN etc.

Because I've worked on many things over many years, most of these scripts also output some "help" output so I can remember how shit works for a given project.

Here's an example:

    # @foo
    
    PROJECT FOO
    -----------
    
    VPN Connection: active, split tunnel
    
    Commands: 
    tests: mvn clean verify -P local_tests
    build all components: buildall
    
    Tools:
    java version: 17.0.16-tem
    maven version: 3.9.11

https://github.com/AbanteAI/rawdog

So if you're in your projects folder and want to keep working on your latest project, I just type "cdn" to go there.

I have used it to build an "escmd" tool for interacting with Elasticsearch. It makes the available commands much more discoverable, the output it formats in tables, and gets rid of sending JSON to a curl command.

A variety of small tools that interact with Jira (list my tickets, show tickets that are tagged as needing ops interaction in the current release).

A tool to interact with our docker registry to list available tags and to modify tags, including colorizing them based on the sha hash of the image so it's obvious which ones are the same. We manage docker container deploys based on tags so if we "cptag stg prod" on a project, that releases the staging artifact to production, but we also tag them by build date and git commit hash, so we're often working with 5-7 tags.

Script to send a "Software has successfully been released" message via gmail from the command-line.

A program to "waituntil" a certain time to run a command: "waituntil 20:00 && run_release", with nice display of a countdown.

I have a problem with working on too many things at once and then committing unrelated things tagged with a particular Jira case. So I had it write me a commit program that lists my tickets, shows the changed files, and lets me select which ones go with that ticket.

All these are things I could have built before, but would have taken me hours each. With the GenAI, they take 5-15 minutes of my attention to build something like this. And Gen AI seems really, really great at building these small, independent tools.

and alias debian="docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/mnt/host -w /mnt/host --name debug-debian debian"

Heres my script if anyone is interested in as I find it to be incredibly useful.

find . -type f \( -name ".tf" -o -name ".tfvars" -o -name ".json" -o -name ".hcl" -o -name ".sh" -o -name ".tpl" -o -name ".yml" -o -name ".yaml" -o -name ".py" -o -name ".md" \) -exec sh -c 'for f; do echo "### FILE: $f ###"; cat "$f"; echo; done' sh {} +

Ex:

    > echo $PWD
    /foo/bar/batz/abc/123

    > dc bar && echo $PWD
    /foo/bar

Also useful when using Zoxide, and I tab complete into a directory tree path where parent directories are not in Zoxide history.

Added tab complete for speed.

So 'p ISSUE-123' :

* creates a folder issues/ISSUE-123 for work files, containing links to a backed up folder and the project repository . The shell is cd'd to it

* The repo might get a new branch with the issue name.

* An IDE might start containing the project.

* The browsers home button brings you to a page with all kinds of relevant links:. The issue tracker, the CI, all kinds of test pages, etc...

* The open/save dialogs for every program gets a shortcut named'issue'

* A note is made in a log that allows me to do time tracking at the end if the week.

* A commit message template with the issue is created.

  kp () {
           if [ -z "$1" ] then
                   echo "Usage: kp <port>"
                   return 1
           fi
           lsof -nP -iTCP:"$1" -sTCP:LISTEN | awk 'NR>1 {print $2}' | xargs kill -9
   }

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    # http://stackoverflow.com/a/9790056
    use List::Util qw(max min sum);
    @a=();
    while(<>){
        $sqsum+=$_*$_;
        push(@a,$_)
    };
    $n=@a;
    $s=sum(@a);
    $a=$s/@a;
    $m=max(@a);
    $mm=min(@a);
    $std=sqrt($sqsum/$n-($s/$n)*($s/$n));
    $mid=int @a/2;
    @srtd=sort @a;
    if(@a%2){
        $med=$srtd[$mid];
    }else{
        $med=($srtd[$mid-1]+$srtd[$mid])/2;
    };
    print "records:$n\nsum:$s\navg:$a\nstd:$std\nmed:$med\max:$m\nmin:$mm";

This can be replaced with

sed -n $1p\;$1q

Test it versus

head -$1|tail -1

On every machine of mine I tend to accumulate a bunch of random little scripts along these lines in my ~/.local/bin, but I never seem to get around to actually putting them anywhere. Trying to knock that habit by putting any new such scripts in a “snippets” repo (https://fsl.yellowapple.us/snippets); ain't a whole lot in there yet, but hopefully that starts to change over time.