Linux Users

I typed it once, I'm not typing it again

Fish once again undefeated. If I want to find that weird image magick command I used earlier with foo.png in it I just type foo.png, hit up and its usually the first one. It doesnt matter where foo.png occurs in the command, fish will find it.

I write part of the command then ctrl+r. Using FZF mind you. Such a great utility.

I've been using ctrl + R more now :3.. though I definitely used to ↑↑↑↑↑↑↑

Woah Ctrl R looks super cool, never knew that I could do that before…
check out fzf (install fzf and add (assuming bash) eval "$(fzf --bash)" to your .bashrc) Makes ctrl+r a superpower
- It's awesome until you want to put the cursor in a specific spot of a previous command.
  
  $ rm -f delete-me.txt ctrl-r "me", ctrl-b, ctrl-k $ rm -f delete
  But I still use fzf because while I used to do the above, fzf offered more advantage that made switching worth it.
- I'll try it if I don't forget it by the next time I have access to my PC lol :3
Ctrl + r with fzf and you’ll never go back.

...until you press up one too many times and enter the same command but with a typo. Again.

Been there, done that.
There is an option you can set in .zshrc or .bashrc which only includes lines that exit 0 (success)
- Infuriatingly that would omit things like unit test runners from the history in case they don't pass. As a developer I tend to re-run failed commands quite often, not sure how widely that applies, though.

The number of people who don’t reverse-I-search is too damn high

^r

and whenever you forget to sudo: sudo !!
- You need this: https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
Ctrl-r, l ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r, ctrl-r. To get ls.
- No way! I didn't know you could cycle through the results like that... awesome!

I’ve probably done that for ls

taptaptaptap.... taptaptaptap.... taptaptaptap taptaptaptap taptaptaptap

.... taptaptaptap

... tap ...

... shit I was on a different user when I typed it.

Or "shit, I did in tmux last time so I could close the terminal window."

O(n) access, very efficient.

No, I do not care to share the value of n

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1168/

tar -jcvf archive.tbz ~/stuff/*
Of course I don't know the bomb had bzip2 on it.. I wonder if we can start with ls to see if there's anything to tar or untar
tar -xvf
<archive-name>
but only because I had to look it up twice so now my brain has committed it to memory
I don't even know what it does
- i just use unar (unarchive) nowadays, since that works with all file formats iirc
- You don't even need the hyphen!
  Mind = blown.
tar --help
tar - h
- Unfortunately that's not valid.
  
  $ tar -h tar: You must specify one of the '-Acdtrux', '--delete' or '--test-label' options Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
  From man-page:
  -h, --dereference follow symlinks; archive and dump the files they point to

Or, just type the command “history”, find the index number of the desired command, then type “!

”, then

<enter>

.

That's way more mental effort than pressing up a bunch of times.
or Ctrl+R then search? I don't know why some people still bother with history tbh.
- Because you can pipe history to grep.
- This is going to save me so much time pressing the up arrow.
Ctrl-R if you know part of the command.
Holy cow!! I didn’t know that. I have been using history > history.txt to find “that one command for that one thing” I only need once every other month or so. Thanks, now I can just do that.

https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin is a great tool to manage and search your shell history. I especially enjoy it being able to search commands based on the working directory I was in when I ran them.

It also has more features (which I don't use) to manage dotfiles and sync shell history across hosts/devices.

I was going to talk about it too ! Even though I'm on fish (which helps a lot with history search) atuin really changed my habits and made my life easier !

In fish, you can enter part of the command, and then press up to search for it. It's kinda awesome.

That's what I do in bash except for pressing up it's ctrl+r. FZF does the fuzzy finding for me. It's so convenient.
yeah I ONLY just recently switched to fish after using zsh and oh my zsh for so long - pretty much since first starting linux cause I once saw someone using it on unixporn and I thought "that's cool"
when I switched to NixOS zsh with all the plugins was a total slog. switched to fish and it just HAS everything that zsh/oh my zsh and the various plugins had but baked in.
so yeah in Fish it's just starting to type something and hoping it's still in the history.

cat ~/.bash_history | grep

Useless use of cat?
- Yes, it was meant to be a self deprecating admission that I have used this unnecessarily verbose command.
- You saying I can just skip cat in that command and it works?

Substring completion on ZSH. Type in a small part of the command you want to find and then press up.

bash supports this feature too btw
- Added to my mental toolbox, thanks!

also when they see this post

Wow this is really validating for me to read. I’ve been using Linux for a few years but I’m definitely not a computer expert and am intimidated by the command line.

I’ve always felt like googling every command and arrowing up to find an old entry rather than just googling it again marked me as a fake Linux user, not a real one.

Lol don't feel bad, I can do advanced crazy shit with Linux like pivoting the running OS into RAM so I can unmount the boot drive to do whatever without ever rebooting
But I still [Web Search] commands a shit ton of the time LMAO
You can use Ctrl-R and Ctrl-Shift-R to search through your history instead of having to push up a bajillion times.
I think that actually makes you a real Linux user...
Nah, fuck the gatekeepers, you're good.

I always go past it because I go way to fast.

I have more then once gave up on pressing up, hit ctrl + c to reset only to see the command I wanted briefly flash up as I am hitting ctrl + c

You have to be a linux user to use the console now?

$ history | grep 'gre[p]' | less -S

Does fuck all when you can't remember even a piece of the command lol
- That's when you start spamming Page Up/Down, Home, End, and / to search within less. Usually seeing various commands jogs my memory, especially when they are grep commands searching for one I use often enough to be useful but infrequently enough to not remember off the top of my head.
This is the answer

Too many people still use Bash.

I like zsh on mac because pretty colors

https://marko.tech/journal/fzf-ftw

grep | history [search term]

I think you meant history | grep [search term]
(which was id 1003 for me btw)
- Oops, but yes that's what I meant.
- alias hf='history|grep'
- I do this all the time for that one long command I use monthly like for cert renewals.

history | grep then !cmd no

I'm in this picture, and I didn't like it....

zsh-autosuggestions
history | fzf
alias cat="bat --plain --theme=gruvbox-dark"

Aliasing cat or any other ubiquitous shell utility to a replacement is a mistake. Garuda did this, and it was driving me crazy why cat was giving me errors. Turns out that they had aliased bat to cat, and since bat is a different program, it didn't work in exactly the same way, and an update had introduced some unexpected behavior.
Drop-in replacements are dumb. Just learn to use a different command.
- I think it's ok to add this in a personal .zshrc, not on a distro level:
  If it breaks something - I'd probably know why and can easily fix it by removing alias/calling cat directly.
  Also, scripts almost always use bash or sh in shebang, not zsh. So it only triggers if I type cat in terminal.

I accidentally found out one day that I could use a wildcard operator in the terminal instead of a full file or folder name due to always doing this.

cd Pho* or cd /documents/Pho*

Will for example open my "Photo Examples" folder in the working directory or based on the path

With ZSH there's something called "path-completion" that makes that even easier.
Say you want to go to "/usr/local/share/fonts" but that's too much to type out, you can instead type "cd /u/l/s/f" and hit tab. If every path element is unambiguous it will just expand it to "/usr/local/share/fonts". In this case though, "/u/l/" can expand to "/usr/local" or "/usr/lib" so when you hit tab it moves the cursor to just after the "l" to indicate it needs you to distinguish between "/usr/local/" and "/usr/lib". If you just type "o" and hit tab again, it will know that there's only one match for "/usr/lo" and expand that to "/usr/local/" Then there's only one match for "s" which is "share", and only one match for "f" which is "fonts".
That avoids the danger of executing a command with an asterisk wildcard.
You can use || between two commands as well. If the first command returns exit code != 0, the second command will run.
I.e. which ansible || pip install ansible.
- Or && for if you only want the second command to run if the first command succeeded.
This only works until you grow an addiction to making pho at home and start documenting your progress.
cd "Pho Recipes and Pictures"
cd /
sudo rm -rf *
Basically the Linux version of deleting system32 but idk I'm not a super Linux nerd yet.
- The fun thing is that you can create a file named "-rf *" and hope an admin tried to delete it!

...Yeah, you got me.

I just use mcfly

Not sure I understand the point of mcfly. zsh and fish have this functionality built in, where pressing Up with a command partially typed will give auto-completions to that partial match.
- Yeah. I also use auto-completions for that. McFly does fuzzy finding and because it's a different separate db, for me it works better across many sessions to find commands I had just recently used in another session.

zsh tab completion also looks through history wich is pretty nice.

The one people see me doing that gets a "huh?" Is:

    
~$ !find
find -type f -name '*blah*' -print0 | xargs -0 gzip
~$

"Wait! What did you do?" "Oh. Do you not know about bang?"

I love the excitement of using !?
Did I remember correctly what command sequence I last used that pattern with? Will my data be gone? Will I send a vulgar email to my boss? Who knows, let's find out!
- That's why you can add ":p" to the end just to print it.
I don't understand people who have the confidence to just blindly run the last matching command like that. Like, are you 100% sure that the last time you ran find was that one, not the one that piped to xargs rm?
At least with zsh you can tab to complete the !find and verify it's what you want before running it. And, AFAIK by default, the shell option hist_verify is set, so if you do just type !find and hit enter, it doesn't run the command, it loads the command into the editing buffer so you can look it over first. Maybe I just have a weak memory, but I really appreciate the footgun prevention. At worst I have to hit enter twice. At best, I save myself a lot of grief.
- Normally the use case is
  Constructed a long command, but it didn't work for some reason.
  I go fix the reason it didn't work
  I do the first thing again
  It's in my recent memory, but maybe there's been 10 or so commands of me fixing stuff in-between.

Oh come on! I at least type the beginning so that it filters the history

I feel like there should be a cursed "long way round" for this that involves needlessly copying .bash_history to a "text file", running it through an asciibetical sorter (for "efficiency"), using sed to null out any command which doesn't match the search term...

Being able to just enter a partial command, and hit [up] to jump to prior commands that started in the same way in zsh is a godsend.

If you ever have to go back to bash, it supports it as well. In my bashrc:

bind '"\C-p":history-search-backward'
That's ctrl-p, but I'm sure the up arrow is possible too.
I use vim keybindings and have ESC,/ to do a reverse command search.

This is why I like atuin, I can just press up and start typing part of the command and it will likely find it in my history.

You could already do that with just "Ctrl-R" but without atuin redrawing your screen.

Linux Recall

Featherpad, copy, paste. Extra work, but you get a work log

I wish this wasn't so painfully true.