Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

I have a bunch, but one that I rarely see mentioned but use all the time is memo(1) (https://github.com/aktau/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/memo).

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.

> trash a.txt b.png moves `a.txt` and `b.png` to the trash. Supports macOS and Linux.

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

I've written on this before, but I have an extensive collection of "at" scripts. This started 25+ years ago when I dragged a PC tower running BSD to a friend's house, and their network differed from mine. So I wrote an @friend script which did a bunch of ifconfig foo.

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

This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm most interested in finding on HN. How do other developers work, and how can I get better at my work from it?

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 :)

It's weird how the circle of life progresses for a developer or whatever.

- 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.

Regarding the `line` script, just a note that sed can print an arbitrary line from a file, no need to invoke a pipeline of cat, head, and tail:

    sed -n 2p file

    sed -n 2,4p file

While you're creating and testing aliases, it's handy to source your ~/.zshrc whenever you edit it:

    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

I use these two all the time to encode and cut mp4s.

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"

Historical note: getting hold of these scripts by chatting to various developers was the motivation for the original 2004 "lifehacks" talk[1][2]. If you ever get into an online argument over what is a "life hack" and what isn't, feel free to use short scripts like these as the canonical example.

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...

I'm kicking myself for not thinking of the `nato` script.

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"

The one I use the most is "cdn". It cds to the newest subdirectory.

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

My fav script to unpack anything, found a few years ago somewhere

      # 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
      }

One script I use quite often:

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

Some cool things here but in general I like to learn and use the standard utilities for most of this. Main reason is I hop in and out of a lot of different systems and my personal aliases and scripts are not on most of them.

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

The Gen AI tooling is exceptionally good at doing these sorts of things, and way more than just "mkdir $1 && cd $1". For example:

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.

> ocr my_image.png extracts text from an image and prints it to stdout. It only works on macOS

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.

I keep meaning to generalize this (directory target, multiple sources, flags), but I get quite a bit of mileage out of this `unmv` script even as it is:

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

I find that I like working with the directory stack and having a shortened version of the directory stack in the title bar, e.g. by modifying the stock Debian .bashrc

  # 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
  }

I have mkcd exactly ( I wonder how many of us do, it's so obvious)

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.

I have three different way to open file with vim: v: vim (or neovim, in my case) vv: search/preview and open file by filename vvv: search/preview and open file by its content

    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)"'

A few I use are:

    #!/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.

With `xsel --clipboard` (put that in an alias like `clip`), you can use the same thing to replace both `copy` and `pasta`:

    # 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

Nice! Tangentially related: I built a (MacOS only) tool called clippy to be a much better pbcopy. It was just added to homebrew core. Among other things, it auto-detects when you want files as references so they paste into GUI apps as uploads, not bytes.

  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

This is really interesting, but I need the highlights reel. So I need a script to summarize Hacker News pages and/or arbitrary web pages. Maybe that's what I want for getting the juice out of Medium articles.

Broadly, I very much love this approach to things and wish it was more "acceptable?" It reminds me of the opposite of things like "the useless use of cat" which to me is one of the WORST meme-type-things in this space.

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

Using 'copy' as a clipboard script tells me OP never lived through the DOS era I guess... Used to drive me mad switching between 'cp' in UNIX and 'copy' in DOS. (Same with the whole slash vs backslash mess.)

I like the NATO one.

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.

For tempe, recommend changing "cd" to "push" do you can "popd" as soon as you're done.

My most used automation copies a file with rclone to backblaze blob storage, and puts the link into the clipboard. (for sharing memes)

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

> alphabet just prints the English alphabet in upper and lowercase. I use this surprisingly often (probably about once a month)

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

I have a bunch of little scripts and aliases I've written over the years, but none are used more than these...

alias ..='cd ..'

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

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

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

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

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

My most important script has been to remap CapsLock as a kind of custom Meta key, that transforms (when pressed) the Space into Return, hjkl into arrows, io into PgUp/PgDn, and 1-9 into function keys. Now I have a 60% keyboard that takes 0 space on my desk. And I am reaaaally happy with this setup.

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

17 years ago I wrote a short VBA macro that takes the high life’s range of cells, concatenates the values into a comma separated list, then opens the list in notepad for easy copy and further use. I can’t begin to count the number of executions by myself and those i have shared it with.

The most useful script I wrote is one I call `posh`. It shorten a file path by using environment variables. Example:

  $ 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`.

> 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.

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.

> url "$my_url" parses a URL into its parts. I use this about once a month to pull data out of a URL, often because I don’t want to click a nasty tracking link.

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

on my ubuntu, `date -I` does iso dates

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

I have a script called catfiles that I store in ~/.local/bin that recursively dumps every source file with an associated file header so I can paste the resulting blob in to Gemini and ChatGPT in order to have a conversation about the changes I would like to make before I send off the resulting prompt to Gemini Code Assist.

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 {} +

> alphabet just prints the English alphabet in upper and lowercase. I use this surprisingly often

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

    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 :)

I started writing way more utility scripts when I found babashka. Magic of clojure, instant startup, easy to shell out to any other command, tons of useful built in stuff, developing with the REPL. It’s just a good time!!

I had my hopes on this project RawDog using local smol sized LLMs but it hasn't been updated in a while. I feel like all this should be running easily in the background nowadays.

https://github.com/AbanteAI/rawdog

Share yours!

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`})()

I like this one.

  $ 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

The scripts from my junk drawer (https://github.com/peterwwillis/junkdrawer) I use every day are 'kd' and 'gw', which use the Unix dialog command to provide an easy terminal UI for Kubectl and Git Worktrees (respectively)... I probably save 15+ minutes a day just flitting around in those UIs. The rest of the scripts I use for random things; tasks in AWS/Git/etc I can never remember, Terraform module refactoring, Bitbucket/GitHub user management, Docker shortcuts, random password generation, mirroring websites with Wget, finding duplicate files, etc.

Obviously, to each their own, but to me, this is an overwhelming amount of commands to remember on top of all the ones they are composed of that you will likely need to know anyway — regardless if all the custom ones exist.

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!

Please note that 'each' is fundamentally different from 'xargs'.

  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

> `rn` prints the current time and date using date and cal.

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

I did something similar with copy until I found this which works across remote terminals too:

`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`

and here's me still ctrl+r-ing for my commonly used methods

Here are some snippets that we've compiled over time:

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.

I've started using snippets for code reviews, where I find myself making the same comments (for different colleagues) regularly. I have a keyboard shortcut opening a fuzzy search to find the entry in a single text file. That saves a lot of time.

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.

One of my biggest headaches is stripping specific number of bytes from the head or tail of a binary file. and I couldn't find any built-in tool for that, so I wrote one in C++.

`line 10` can be written as `sed -n 10p` (instead of head+tail)

My most used function is probably the one I use to find the most recent files:

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

These are great, and I have a few matching myself.

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"

Love this, lots of great ideas I'll be stealing :)

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.

> `nato bar` returns Bravo Alfa Romeo. I use this most often when talking to customer service and need to read out a long alphanumeric string, which has only happened a couple of times in my whole life. But it’s sometimes useful!

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.

I got a ccurl python script that extracts the cookies from my Firefox profile and then passes those on to curl, that way I can get webpages where I'm logged in.

As a fun game, I suggest feeding the entire piece to an LLM and asking it to create those scripts. The differences between Claude, GOT-5 and Gemini are very interesting.

As a bonus, I prepend my custom aliases or scripts with my user name and hyphen (i.e helicaltwine-). It helps me recall rarely used scripts when I need them and forget the names.

This is one area that I've found success in vibe coding with. Making scripts for repetitive tasks that are just above the complexity threshold where the math between automating and doing manually is not so clear. I have copilot generate the code for me and honestly I don't care too much of its quality, extensibility, and are easy enough to read through where I don't feel like my job is AI pr reviewer.

Nice. I have a bash script similar to the one listed "removeexif" called prep_for_web which takes any image file (PNG, BMP, JPG, WebP), scrubs EXIF data, checks for transparency and then compresses it to either JPG using MozJPEG or to PNG using PNGQuant.

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

[2] https://pngquant.org

An important advantage of aliases was not mentioned: I see everything in one place and can easily build aliases on top of other aliases without much thinking.

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

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

I also have a radio script to play internet streams with mpv (?). Other random stuff

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

Mkdir then cd into it, I just use ‘take’? Maybe this isn’t available by default everywhere?

Interesting, but none of the links are working... codeberg.org isn't responding, it just spins forever.

A couple more standard approaches with fewer chars:

jsonformat -> jq

running -> pgrep

fish abbreviations >> bash aliases

Thank you, I also stopped using aliases and have everything as scripts in my ~/bin

absolutely love these time savers!!

Why dont we have mkcd in linux natively boggles my mind :)

Lately I’ve been using caffeinate to run long running scripts without interruption from sleep on Mac. Nothing crazy but could be useful to newer devs.

These arent bad but much better if they were all flags to the cat command.

E.g. cat --copy

if you use x0vnc (useful if you use a linux machine both from the attached screen and from vnc, and in a bunch of other scenarios), copy and paste to and fro the vnc client is not implemented, quite frustrating. here's 2 scripts that does that for you, I now use this all day. https://github.com/francoisp/clipshare

Some of these, especially text processing, is already built-in Nushell.

4:20 PM - nice

A lot of these scripts could be just shell aliases.

It's been a while since I haven't read something as useful!

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

Does anyone have links to other awesome articles like this?

Where are the one letter aliases? My life got better after I alias k=kubectl

30% of the productivity hacks can be archived in vanilla Nushell.

The markdownquote can be replaced by (at least in vim):

^ (jump to the beginning)

ctrl+v (block selection)

j (move cursor down)

shift+i (bulk insert?)

type ><space>

ESC

Love this. Gunna use plenty of these

in oh-my-zsh you can use `take` to do what mkcd does.

I had youtube and serveit and some others, but pasta is really good, thanks!

that was beautiful to read. command line ftw!

`perldoc perlrun`

Not really a one liner but this comes in handy for quick dns on multiple hostnames:

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

this is really great. at some point i gavenup on being more efficient on the terminal, but many pain points are solved by your work

mksh is already the MirBSD Korn SHell

The "scripts" I use the most that I am most happy with are a set of Vagrant tools that manage initialising different kinds of application environments with an apt cache on the host. Also .ssh/config includes to make it as easy as possible to work with them from VSCode.

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.

> wifi toggle

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. :)

I hope to see an operating system with these scripts as built-in, because they are so intuitive and helpful! Which OS will be the first to take this on?

Looks very useful!

cool collection

no offense but a lot of those script are pretty hacky they may work for the user but i would not use them without making sure to review them and adapt them to my workflow