What's a handy terminal command you use often?

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

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

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

sudo !! to rerun last command as sudo.

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

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

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)

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.

I use atuin (link) all the time

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

Sudo !!

It reruns the last command as sudo.

Pretty useful since I'm always forgetting.

ls and cd

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.

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.

I really like that cd command. :P

exit

sudo udevadm monitor

Figuring out which usb device went on holiday.

Uhhh...sudo su

Don't be like me

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

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

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).

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.

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

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.

sudo

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.

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

cd every single day.

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.

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

g-push which is alias for

git push origin `git branch --show`

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

In my ~/.bashprofile: alias resource="source ~/.bashprofile"

In my terminal: resource

Anything to save a few characters

After using too much WINE, I type pwd, whoami

clear. Constantly, and for no reason.

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

sl

exit

Btop is an amazing resource monitor

ls

I do love fuck.

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

Neofetch

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.

ncdu

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

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

sudo

sudo pacman -Syu

sudo rm -rf /

Very powerful yet helpful command :-)

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

GNU Parallel

nano

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.

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

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.

jq

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

ll

df -h

du -sch

Ctrl+r

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

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).

$ z

A great cd alternative

Also $ sudo paru -Syu

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

ls -al

Neofetch

I just think it's neat.

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

rsync

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

flac -t *

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 }

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

atools, which includes als, aunpack, apack. so you can stop caring about the kind of archive and just unpack it. it also saves you from shit archives that have multiple files/dirs in their root.
perl -e / perl -lne / ...
units
bc - a calculator that's actually good
pass - the only non-shit password store tool i've found so far. no gui, uses gpg and git to do the encrypting and storage/sharing
alias lr='ls -lrth' - so you can easily find the newest file, cos that's frequently what you want
unip - my script to look up things in the unicode db
find -type f -exec xzgrep 're' {} + - because xzgrep cant do -r