Command line tips for OS X and Linux

I wrote last year about keeping .ssh, .gpg, and other sensitive information on an encrypted disk and create soft links so when the disk is mounted, sensitive information is available.

I have a few command line tricks that save me a lot of time that are worth sharing:
  • Use a pattern like history | grep rsync to quickly find recent commands. Much better than wading through your history.
  • Make aliases for accessing services on specific servers for example alias kb2_mongo='mongo xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:11222'. By having consistent naming aliases for your servers and for running specific services like the mongo console, it is easy to both remember your aliases and use them.
  • Create aliases with consistent naming conventions to ssh to all of your servers. I use different prefixes for my servers and for each of my customers.
  • Create an alias like alias lh='ls -lth | head' to quickly see just the most recently modified files in a directory, most recent first.
  • For your working development system create two letter aliases to get to common working directories (most recent projects, writing, top level code experiment directory, etc.). I try to be consistent and use some of the same aliases on my servers.

Comments

  1. Alex Ott6:10 AM

    Ctrl-R allows to interactively search in history (bash/zsh)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant8:23 AM

    Thanks Alex, much faster than my grep approach. It is still sometimes nice to see all matches at once with grep, but your is definitely the better approach.

    -Mark

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alex Ott8:45 AM

    You can also press Ctrl-R during search, to move to next matching record (Ctrl-s should also work to search to previous matching record) - this is standard readline (emacs) key bindings

    ReplyDelete

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