I came across a post about one-liners recently. It got me thinking about the commands I use the most. An incomplete list, in no particular order:
emacs -nw - Yes, I am an emacs user (who knows just enough vi to get by when emacs is unavailable.) And yes, I could alias this so that I don’t have to type the -nw every time. This is largely a muscle-memory holdover from a Previous Life, when sometimes I’d log into a machine that (1) had an X server running with forwarding enabled, and (2) didn’t have an alias set up. I never want the GUI…I always want it in my terminal.
ps -wwef - Another muscle-memory holdover, somewhere along the way this became my preferred set of ps flags. (I’m not entirely sure how I never ended up on the decidedly more-popular ps aux train.)
perl -p -i -e ‘s/string/replacement/’ [filename] - I’m not proud of it, but this is mostly because every time I try to use sed results in 15 minutes of me futzing around trying to figure out how on Earth sed’s escaping works.
rsync -avz –delete $source_dir/ $dest_machine:$dest_dir/ - The critical bit for me here is the trailing slash on both source and destination, which means “make $dest_dir look like $source_dir” as opposed to “create $source_dir in $dest_dir”. I used to accidentally do the latter All. The. Time. before just following the convention of always including the trailing slashes.
ls -Satan -is -a -llama - This one isn’t actually a command that has any practical utility to anyone so far as I can tell…but it’s my favorite example of a common command supporting perhaps too many flags, a delicious subversion of the Unix philosophy of “do one thing and do it well.” Satan is a llama, indeed.
Bonus content: aliases
I could (and might) do a whole separate post on aliases, but here are a few that I’ve come to love:
alias emasc=emacs - Easily my most common typo.
alias l.=”ls -d .*" - For when I only want to see dotfiles.
alias igrep=”grep -i” - Case-insensitive grep.
alias vgrep=”grep -v” - Inverted grep (i.e., show me everything that doesn’t match the pattern)
What are some of your favorite one-liners?