What's a handy terminal command you use often?

sudo !! to rerun last command as sudo.

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

cd then ls then cd then ls maybe I’ll throw a ls -a

I really like that cd command. :P

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

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

sudo udevadm monitor

Figuring out which usb device went on holiday.

Sudo !!

It reruns the last command as sudo.

Pretty useful since I'm always forgetting.

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.

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

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.

pushd and popd to change directory and go back when done there.

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.

After using too much WINE, I type pwd, whoami

As primarily a Windows admin (Yes, we exist on Lemmy ;) ) here are few I use often.

• Enter-PSSesion
• Get-ADUser (also group and computer)
• CLS (aka the superior clear)
• ii . (short for Invoke-Item . which runs the selected object using the default method. For paths (like .) the default is explorer, so ii . opens the current directory using explorer.)
• ft (short for Format-Table formats piped input as a table.)
• fl (short for format-like. Used like ft but for lists.)
• Where-Object
• Select-Object

pv (Pipe Viewer) is a command line tool to view verbose information about data streamed/piped through it. The data can be of any source like files, block devices, network streams etc. It shows the amount of data passed through, time running, progress bar, percentage and the estimated completion time.

Uhhh...sudo su

Don't be like me

clear. Constantly, and for no reason.

cd every single day.

ls and cd

CTR + u will delete the whole command. I use that a lot so I don't have to backspace. It's saved me a ton of time

xdg-open FILE - opens a file with the default GUI app. I use it for example to open PDFs and PNG. I have a one letter alias for that. It can also open a file explorer in the current directory xdg-open . . Should work on any compliant desktop environment (gnome/kde).

sl

ls

Btop is an amazing resource monitor

ll

df -h

du -sch

Ctrl+r

ls -al

ls -lAh

diff -y -W 200 file1 file2

Shows a side by side diff of 2 files with enough column width to see most of what I need usually.

I have actually aliased this command as diffy

ctrl-r

searching bash history

du -sh * | sort -h

shows size of all files and dirs in the current dir and sorts them in ascending order so you can easily see the largest files or dirt ant the end of the list

ls -ltr

Shows the most recently modified files at the end of the listing.

sudo pacman -Syu

• man
• fd
• entr
• rg
• gitui
• nvim
• tee
• cd
• mv
• rm
• ls
• tmux
• btop
• yazi
• du
• xargs
• cat
• less

On my desktop: df -h to check disk usage htop to see resource usage ll list directory contents

I recently learned to use a for loop on the command line to organize hundreds of files in a few seconds.

$ touch foo{1..5}.txt
$ rename -v 's/foo/bar/' foo*
foo1.txt renamed as bar1.txt
foo2.txt renamed as bar2.txt
foo3.txt renamed as bar3.txt
foo4.txt renamed as bar4.txt
foo5.txt renamed as bar5.txt
$ rename -v 's/\.txt/.text/' *.txt
bar1.txt renamed as bar1.text
bar2.txt renamed as bar2.text
bar3.txt renamed as bar3.text
bar4.txt renamed as bar4.text
bar5.txt renamed as bar5.text
$ rename -v 's/(.*)\.text/1234-$1.txt/' *.text
bar1.text renamed as 1234-bar1.txt
bar2.text renamed as 1234-bar2.txt
bar3.text renamed as 1234-bar3.txt
bar4.text renamed as 1234-bar4.txt
bar5.text renamed as 1234-bar5.txt

seq 1 100 | xargs -I'%%' -P 10 sh -c 'mkdir Data_X0%% && mv x0%%* Data_X0%%;'

Not a command but bang expansions. For example !? is the args of last command useful for stuff like mkdir foo ; cd !?

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/bash-bang-commands learn these. you suck at using your computer if you don't know them.

Not a command as much as I press the up arrow a lot. I'm.pretty lazy and hitting the up arrow 12 times is easier then retyping a complex rsync command.

nmtui. But that's because my router is trash.

ncdu

For Debian based/descended distros:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

And technically I also regularly use

redshift -O 3000

all of the blue light filter programs try to align themselves with a user's geographic location and time, but I don't keep normal hours

sudo

jq

Neofetch

nano

I've recently started using tmux when starting a new SSH session to try to build the habit.

https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki

g-push which is alias for

git push origin `git branch --show`

Which I'm writing on my phone without testing or looking

I use atuin (link) all the time

Seems like an appropriate place to share https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps

I'm a fan of ripgrep and lsd in particular.

ls -al

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y gpg

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eza-community/eza/main/deb.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/gierens.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/gierens.gpg] http://deb.gierens.de stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gierens.list
sudo chmod 644 /etc/apt/keyrings/gierens.gpg /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gierens.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y eza

Getting cheatsheets via curl cheat.sh/INSERT_COMMAND_HERE

No install necessary, Also, you can quickly search within the cheatsheets via ~. For example if you copy curl cheat.sh/ls~find will show all the examples of ls that use find. If you remove ~find, then it shows all examples of ls.

I have a function in my bash alias for it (also piped into more for readability):

function cht() { curl cheat.sh/"$1"?style=igor|more }

du -sh /too/bar to get size of files/folders. sudo !! inserts sudo into previous command when forgotten. yay for full system update if yay is installed. cat reads files.

history | fzf

GNU Parallel

I do love fuck.

I use "ping" every time I suspect my internet might be going a bit slow.

sudo rm -rf /

Very powerful yet helpful command :-)

Going to shamelessly plug my custom bashrc setup which has a ton of little scripting helpers and a few useful aliases. Remember to clone recursively if you want to try it out. (Still very much a work in progress, but it's getting to be pretty robust)

https://GitHub.com/pyr0ball/PRbL-bashrc.git

qmv -f do ${dir}

... for quickly moving and renaming files. The default 'qmv' opens up your preferred text editor with a list of the source and destination name of the directory of files you want to move/rename. The '-f do' tells the command we only want to see/edit the [d]estination [o]nly. If you need to rename/move a bunch of files, it's much quicker to do it in vim (at least for me).

I really like how nushell can parse output into it's native structures called tables using the detect command.

Unlike string outputs, tables allow for easy data manipulation through pipes like select foo will select foo key and you can filter and even reshape the datasets.

This is great if you need to work with large data pipes like kuberneters so you can do something like:

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces | detect columns | where $it.STATUS !~ "Running|Completed" | par-each { |it| kubectl -n $it.NAMESPACE delete pod $it.NAME }

This looks complex but it parses kubectl table string to table object -> filters rows only where status is not running or completed -> executes pod delete task for each row in parallel.

Nushell take a while to learn but having real data objects in your terminal pipes is incredible! Especially with the detect command.

There's are few more shells that do that though nu is the most mature one I've seen so far.

touch 😏

locate, from the mlocate package. So useful. Honorable mention goes out to tldr.

not sure if it counts as a command, but i use the up arrow to scroll through previous commands like, almost every time I open a terminal.

ranger

Zoxide, dust, fd, rg, btm, tokei. So many newer Rust tools that are way better than the old stuff.

Saving this thread for later, but I use rsync -a a lot.

sudo

qalc

More of a shortcut, CTRL + A + D to exit the current session (exits a sudo su first, then a ssh, then the actual terminal)

plz from https://github.com/m1guelpf/plz-cli

I often play an old DOS game in DOSBox, and when I exit it doesn't reset the screen resolution. So I reset it manually by typing

xrandr -output e-DP1 -auto

rsync

I use it to backup important work to an external drive.

less, watch

Ctrl-r with https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin is amazing. Never forget a command you used ever again.

$ z

A great cd alternative

Also $ sudo paru -Syu

Neofetch

git

flac -t *

Neofetch

I just think it's neat.

[2J[H

Is one of my favorites. Of course, most of you are too young to know what that means.