• papertowels@lemmy.one
    64·
    2 months ago

    sudo !! to rerun last command as sudo.

    history can be paired with !5 to run the fifth command listed in history.

    • Kelly Aster 🏳️‍⚧️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      @[email protected] I’ve been working in the bash shell since 1993 and did not know sudo !! was a thing. Good lord, I no longer have to press up, press crtl-left a bunch of times, then type sudo enter space anymore. And I can give it an easy-to-remember alias like ‘resu’ or ‘redo’! Ahahaha, this changes everything! Thank you!!

      • papertowels@lemmy.one
        7·
        2 months ago

        I believe it’s the fifth oldest - I think !-5 will get you the fifth impost recent, but I was shown that and haven’t put it into practice.

        The most common usecase I do is something like history | grep docker to find docker commands I’ve ran, then use ! followed by the number associated with the command I want to run in history.

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      Love these, I used a terminal select from history with fuzzy finding to do the !5 as redo

  • Jess@lemmy.world
    39·
    2 months ago

    tldr because I am too impatient to read through man pages or google the exact syntax for what I want to do.

    • pixelscript@lemm.eeEnglish
      26·
      2 months ago

      There are exactly three kinds of manpages:

      1. Way too detailed
      2. Not nearly detailed enough
      3. There is no manpage

      I will take 1 any day over 2 or 3. Sometimes I even need 1, so I’m grateful for them.

      But holy goddamn is it awful when I just want to use a command for aguably its most common use case and the flag or option for that is lost in a crowd of 30 other switches or buried under some modal subcommand. grep helps if you already know the switch, which isn’t always.

      You could argue commands like this don’t have “arguably most common usecases”, so manpages should be completely neutral on singling out examples. But I think the existence of tl;dr is the counterargument.

      Tangent complaint: I thought the Unix philosophy was “do one thing, and do it well”? Why then do so many of these shell commands have a billion options? Mostly /s but sometimes it’s flustering.

          • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
            5·
            2 months ago

            I can appreciate that. Appologies if you know this already, but just don’t like them. Here are some tips.

            It helps a lot to get title/subtitle/flag highlighting. By default man pages are hard to use simply because of how dense they are. It’s much easier to skim when you can separate the parts you are looking for up front from the text.

            Don’t forget ‘/’, ‘n’, and ‘N’. First way to use man pages more effectively is to search them easily. And you can search via regex. Often I’m looking for more info on a particular flag. So I’ll press ‘/’ followed by ‘^ *-g’. For a g flag.

            Take notes on the side. It saves you time later. Your future self will thank you. And you learn a lot by skimming them.

            Man pages can be intimidating/confusing, but, imho, it’s worth training that skill. Even if you are slower up front, it’s totally worth it.

            • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
              2·
              2 months ago

              thanks for the advice. I knew about the search feature, but sometimes the stuff you need isn’t even on the page. I have no idea how to find what I need when it’s not in “man cmdname” how am I supposed to know that the feature i want has a dedicated page?

              how could I find certain commands if i didn’t already know it was a shell builtin and not a command? It’s not like you get a manpage saying “this is not a command”. And even if i did have the idea to open the bash page, it’s still useless, because builtins are their own dedicated page. That sort of stuff. It rarely ever makes things easier for me.

              edit, it is occasionally useful phen I have already found what I want on google and just want some more in depth details.

              • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
                1·
                2 months ago

                Unfortunately, sometimes (often) there is no man page for what you are looking for. So if you get a page not found, that’s usually the case. You can usually find associated pages all the way at the bottom. That helps when what you are looking for isn’t a command, but a reference. I don’t remember exactly where it is, but man pages are stored in a directory. Probably /etc or /usr. You can always dump that list into fzf or use grep to search to see if there is a page for what you are looking for. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but it’s a good one to have in your toolbelt.

              • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
                1·
                2 months ago

                If something is a bash built-in run help blah for it’s “man page”

                But yeah, man pages tick me off. Wait until you learn that there are sometimes more than one per command. I have to Google which page is which because they’re all for specific things. man foo is the equivalent of man 1 foo. What’s annoying is that the few times I’ve seen something referenced on another page the entry usually just says something like it’s on “the relevant man page” rather than just telling you exactly which.

                • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
                  1·
                  2 months ago

                  ok but that still entails trying random things until i find it. If I didn’t already know it was a builtin i wouldn’t know to search there. The bash thing was just an example. I have learned this stuff since i encountered the problem. This is just me recollecting my experience of trying to use man

  • renzev@lemmy.world
    38·
    2 months ago

    tldr is great. Basically a crowd-sourced alternative to man with much more concise entries. Example:

    $ tldr dhcpcd

  DHCP client.
  More information: <https://roy.marples.name/projects/dhcpcd>.

  Release all address leases:

      sudo dhcpcd --release

  Request the DHCP server for new leases:

      sudo dhcpcd --rebind
  • pemptago@lemmy.mlEnglish
    37·
    2 months ago

    I went a little overboard and wrote a one-liner to accurately answer this question

    history|cut -d " " -f 5|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|head -5

    Note: history displays like this for me 20622 2023-02-18 16:41:23 ls I don’t know if that’s because I set HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T ' in .bashrc, or if it’s like that for everyone. If it’s different for you change -f 5 to target the command. Use -f 5-7 to include flags and arguments.

    My top 5 (since last install)

       2002 ls
   1296 cd
    455 hx
    427 g
    316 find

    g is an alias for gitui. When I include flags and arguments most of the top commands are aliases, often shortcuts to a project directory.

    Not to ramble, but after doing this I figured I should alias the longest, most-used commands (even aliasing ls to l could have saved 2002 keystrokes :P) So I wrote another one-liner to check for available single characters to alias with:

    for c in 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; do [[ ! $(command -v $c) ]] && echo $c; done

    In .bash_aliases I’ve added alias b='hx ${HOME}/.bash_aliases' to quickly edit aliases and alias r='source ${HOME}/.bashrc' to reload them.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
    33·
    2 months ago

    control+R

    in bash, it lets you quickly search for previously executed commands.

    its very useful and makes things much quicker, i recommend you give it a try.

  • zlatiah@lemmy.world
    30·
    2 months ago

    clear because apparently I am too scatterbrained to comprehend more than one full page of text in the terminal

    • feddylemmy@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 months ago

      I like using CRTL+L to clear. It’s nice because you can have a command typed out and still be able to press CTRL+L to clear the screen and keep the command typed out.

        • zlatiah@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 months ago

          Oh god I also do this… See the comment below, I ran history|cut -d " " -f 5|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|less on my personal laptop, my third most commonly used command (behind ls and cd) is just typing in nothing…

      • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
        1·
        2 months ago

        Use script instead, you can even have it in your .*shrc to run automatically whenever a shell is invoked (make sure to add a check that the shell wasn’t invoked by script, so you don’t inadvertently forkbomb yourself)

        Alternatively, just use Terminator as yout terminal emulator and enable the logger anytime you need it to record the shell session.

        Also, use bookmarks. That’s what they’re there for. 100 tabs is a great way to clutter your brain, but terrible for productivity. If you forget about it after bookmarking, it wasn’t important to begin with.

        • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          100 tabs is in mobile. I don’t even scroll back to clutter my brain but its there. Tabs are history for me… So I use firefox focus and if there is anything important, i open with firefox.

          What script are you reffering to? To log all output? I don’t wanna store that but need an assurance that its there till i close terminal window lol

  • notfromhere@lemmy.ml
    301·
    2 months ago

    Since nobody has said yet, I use screen pretty heavily. Want to run a long running task, starting it from your phone? Run screen to create a detachable session then the long running command. You can then safely close out of your terminal or detach with ctrl a, d and continue in your terminal doing something else. screen -r to get back to it.

    • gitamar@feddit.orgDeutsch
      8·
      2 months ago

      I recently switched to tmux and boy, it’s way better. I basically use only tmux now anymore. Creating panes to have two processes in one glance, multiple windows, awesome. Plus all the benefits of screen.

      • pyr0ball@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        2 months ago

        You can’t mention nohup without at least mentioning kill -9 or pkill to slay the monster you created you madman

        • Caveman@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 months ago

          Eyyy, don’t hate, this is how I start all my work programs. That command is really nice and creates all work programs as children of a single terminal session for easy closing later.

          • pyr0ball@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            2 months ago

            No hate! Just need to make sure people know so they don’t create a bazillion threads without realizing it, or how to stop them effectively

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 months ago

      Also, screen can connect to an UART device or serial or anything that offers up a TTY

    • muzzle@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 months ago

      I Always forget to run screen first, so I just rely heavily on dtach

    • krash@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 months ago

      How does screen / tmux work when detached from a session, how does it keep the session alive (both when running locally, and while ssh:ing to a server)? Is there a daemon involved?

  • BougieBirdie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    251·
    2 months ago

    Not a specific command, but I learned recently you can just dump any executable script into ~/bin and run it from the terminal.

    I suffer greatly from analysis paralysis, I have a very hard time making decisions especially if there’s many options. So I wrote a script that reads a text file full of tasks and just picks one. It took me like ten minutes to write and now I spend far more time doing stuff instead of doing nothing and feeling badly that I can’t decide what to do.