this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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Saved Commands/Scripts (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Does anybody else have a library of saved commands/scripts? What's in it? How do you organize it? Is there anything you'd want to share that other people might find helpful?

I do. I keep it in VS Code and store complicated (for me) stuff that I can't remember or worry I might not.

  1. Playlist download with yt-dlp with all my best settings, adding playlist index as track number.

  2. Ffmpeg metadata cleaner for music. Searching title for a bunch of specific strings to remove, setting the band, album, etc. and saving these in a new folder.

  3. Desktop file contents for when I need to create one for an appimage

  4. The script I used to bind audio output switching to a hotkey

  5. How to use ADB for when android blocks sideloading the normal way and I inevitably forget what Android Debug Bridge is or how to use it.

Linux Mint btw. Also yes, I am a noob.

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[–] Egonallanon@feddit.uk 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My go to is sticking what I can in my profile and making aliased commands for them all. Don't have many for Linux quite yet but my PS profile is lapsed with dozens of these.

[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This should be the next step for me. When you do aliased commands, can they take arguments? Like to download a playlist with yt-dlp, could i do download-playlist [URL]?

[–] fratermus@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

When you do aliased commands, can they take arguments? Like to download a playlist with yt-dlp, could i do download-playlist [URL]?

They don't take arguments in the sense that functions do but in bash at least they are passed on as part of the expanded string. Pasted from bash:

alias argtest='echo arg is'  
argtest foo  
arg is foo

So yes you could alias your yt-dlp commands and invoke the alias with the URL.

[–] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah. This is my alias to download music from YouTube alias yt-dmus='yt-dlp -x --audio-format opus "$@"'

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

alias e='echo "${@}"' Wait a second, Bash does not process arguments in alias. This is an incredible trick new to me! All the years I was writing a function to accomplish that. I wonder if there is any drawback to this technique.

[–] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

Not that I know of

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Aliases themselves do not take arguments. You can write Bash function for that case. Here is a "simple" example. I leave the comments there explaining the command too:

treegrep

treegrep() {
    # grep:
    #   --recursive             like --directories=recurse
    #   --files-with-match      print only names of FILEs with selected lines
    # tree:
    #   --fromfile              Reads paths from files (.=stdin)
    #   -F                      Appends '/', '=', '*', '@', '|' or '>' as per ls -F.

    grep --recursive --files-with-match "${@}" |
        tree --fromfile -F
}

yesnoYou can also set variables to be local to the function, meaning they do not leak to outside or do not get confused with variables from outside the function:

# usage: yesno [prompt]
# example:
#   yesno && echo yes
#   yesno Continue? && echo yes || echo no
yesno() {
    local prompt
    local answer
    if [[ "${#}" -gt 0 ]]; then
        prompt="${*} "
    fi
    read -rp "${prompt}[y/n]: " answer
    case "${answer}" in
    [Yy0]*) return 0 ;;
    [Nn1]*) return 1 ;;
    *) return 2 ;;
    esac
}

[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This is what I ended up doing, and it works great. I knew about aliases, but didn't really use them at all - I didn't know about bash functions though.

So now I have a few functions in .bashrc for short things and am just aliasing shell scripts for easy access to more complex tbings I don't want cluttering the file