Technology

I've seen a few of these "shell tricks" articles. This one I actually learned quite a few, which I will promptly forget when I actually need to use them.

Nothing gets my nerdrage on more than using CTRL+w in a browser-based shell and closing the tab.

CTRL + W? Why did I only learn about this today? About 20 years too late! Thank you.

website is down for me?

This is a good article, especially if you're the lucky 10,000.

Great article but this shouldn't be called "Tricks" it should be called Shell Basics. I'm old enough to remember taking an Intro To Unix course and there was an entire day on the shell where these types of commands were presented as essential learning.

set -e: Exit on error. Very useful, but notoriously weird with edge cases (especially inside conditionals like if statements, while loops, and pipelines). Don’t rely on it blindly as it can create false confidence. (Pro-tip: consider set -euo pipefail for a more robust safety net, but learn its caveats first.)

while I appreciate that the author mentions how weird this is, nobody is going to learn all the caveats correctly. Don't use set -e. Don't use set -e. Don't use set -e. It's a shit ass broken ass fucked feature that half of nobody understands well. Here's a great wiki page explaining why it's trash: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105

People like Go, and Go requires you to manually and stupidly handle every possible error case. Why not do the same for shell? It's really quite easy:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
echoerr() { echo "$@" 1>&2; }

die() {
  message="$1"; shift
  exit_code="${1:-1}"
  echoerr "$message"
  exit "$exit_code"
}

temp_dir="$HOME/tmp"
mkdir -p "$temp_dir" || die "Failed to make persistent temporary dir $temp_dir"
lc_dir="$(mktemp -d -p "$temp_dir")" || die "Failed to make target dir in $temp_dir"

Look at that, descriptive error messages! And it doesn't depend on a shell feature that is inconsistent between versions with no good documentation about all of the fucked up caveats.

Great article. I have leanred a lot of these tricks and shortcuts over the years yet I still learned quite a few things that would be useful.

Particularly that you can paste what you cleared with ctrl+U. No more opening a second tab or creating an additional ssh connection.

Unrelated but I like your username. Reminds me of a certain instance ;)

Ctrl + L is very nice..... holy shit

On a new rocky 10 install Ctrl + R doesn't do much. I can't find commands I know I typed. I can't be bothered to find out why

Please make the site respect my color setting by default.

It's a sunny spring day.

~~I was expecting some cool Mario strats~~

I'm always using "clear" to just get rid of my console's output. I think it has something to do with me remembering I used that on my old 80's computer, trying it out on a bash long after that and "oh, that works here too, that's convenient".

Reset looks like it does more stuff, but I don't know if that's useful for this use case.

Wow thanks just picked up some great tricks.

Especially sudo !!

I use CTRL+D a lot, but I didn't know it was a send EOF command. Why does that close the session / terminal?

Also, the undo shortcut is also pretty nice (CTRL+_ ?) and missing there

Never tell the emacs haters why ctrl- and alt-stuff is just so familiar to the rest of us.

Here's a real shell trick for you:

Remove the arrow keys from you keyboard for a month or two.

Seriously, do it. Do you know how to jump to the beginning of the line? The end? Move one word back? One character back? After a month without arrow keys you will know, trust me.

Shell?

Surely systemd has absorbed it by now!

None of these are accurate. The only shell trick that genuinely saves your sanity is fish. (/jk)

Also, these are genuinely very basic tips. It's much more useful to learn about tmux, plugins (e.g., atuin), and useful commands like sed, grep, fd, awk, etc. Pretty much everything this article mentions becomes second nature in fish, leaving you to focus on more important things. Like learning neovim or emacs!