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.

@[email protected] I've been working in the bash shell since 1993 and did not know sudo !! was a thing. Good lord, I no longer have to press up, press crtl-left a bunch of times, then type sudo enter space anymore. And I can give it an easy-to-remember alias like 'resu' or 'redo'! Ahahaha, this changes everything! Thank you!!
- We're all learning tricks in this thread! Grateful for all y'all nerds.
Fifth as in fifth most recent command or fifth oldest?
- I believe it's the fifth oldest - I think !-5 will get you the fifth impost recent, but I was shown that and haven't put it into practice.
  
  The most common usecase I do is something like history | grep docker to find docker commands I've ran, then use ! followed by the number associated with the command I want to run in history.
Love these, I used a terminal select from history with fuzzy finding to do the !5 as redo

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

I use -A instead, which doesn't show "." and ".."
Nah you gotta alias ls -a to la for more efficiency.
- l
Don't forget your pwd thrown in to get back your bearings!
- Done be silly, that's part of my prompt.

I really like that cd command. :P

You'll love zoxide then.
Hm I wonder, is it really a command? I thought it is just a function of the shell to change the working directory.
- A command is anything you execute in the shell.
  
  cd is just a built-in command

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

There are exactly three kinds of manpages:

Way too detailed

Not nearly detailed enough

There is no manpage

I will take 1 any day over 2 or 3. Sometimes I even need 1, so I'm grateful for them.

But holy goddamn is it awful when I just want to use a command for aguably its most common use case and the flag or option for that is lost in a crowd of 30 other switches or buried under some modal subcommand. grep helps if you already know the switch, which isn't always.

You could argue commands like this don't have "arguably most common usecases", so manpages should be completely neutral on singling out examples. But I think the existence of tl;dr is the counterargument.

Tangent complaint: I thought the Unix philosophy was "do one thing, and do it well"? Why then do so many of these shell commands have a billion options? Mostly /s but sometimes it's flustering.
- tldr is the first of 4 ways I rtfm. Then -h, man, and then the arch wiki

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

Well....slap my ass and call me Mary.....
Thanks kind internet stranger!
:O
Woah, that's dope as heck. Thank you!

sudo udevadm monitor

Figuring out which usb device went on holiday.

Wow, super useful command. Starring this comment

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.

Helix?
- Yup! Migrated from VSCodium; wanted to learn a modal editor but didn't have the time or confidence to configure vim or neovim. It's been my go-to editor for 2+ years now.
Holy shit, you're a madman
history -i

Sudo !!

It reruns the last command as sudo.

Pretty useful since I'm always forgetting.

Most commands soon followed by sudo !!

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 use this constantly

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

I like using CRTL+L to clear. It's nice because you can have a command typed out and still be able to press CTRL+L to clear the screen and keep the command typed out.
I almost never use clear because i'm afraid if i will need the text later.(just like infinity tab number on firefox)
- <enter> * 20
- Use script instead, you can even have it in your .*shrc to run automatically whenever a shell is invoked (make sure to add a check that the shell wasn't invoked by script, so you don't inadvertently forkbomb yourself)
  
  Alternatively, just use Terminator as yout terminal emulator and enable the logger anytime you need it to record the shell session.
  
  Also, use bookmarks. That's what they're there for. 100 tabs is a great way to clutter your brain, but terrible for productivity. If you forget about it after bookmarking, it wasn't important to begin with.

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.

I recently switched to tmux and boy, it's way better. I basically use only tmux now anymore. Creating panes to have two processes in one glance, multiple windows, awesome. Plus all the benefits of screen.
- Try zellij. Not as popular as tmux, but very intuitive to use.
- Maybe someone reading wants to now about prefix+s. This doubles your excitement.
In a similar vein, nohup lets you send tasks to the background and seems to be everywhere.
- You can't mention nohup without at least mentioning kill -9 or pkill to slay the monster you created you madman
Also, screen can connect to an UART device or serial or anything that offers up a TTY
I Always forget to run screen first, so I just rely heavily on dtach
- Simply change your terminal command to execute the terminal multiplexer of your choice.
  
  man terminal_of_choice, look for (start) command.
How does screen / tmux work when detached from a session, how does it keep the session alive (both when running locally, and while ssh:ing to a server)? Is there a daemon involved?
- You can find out by running screen and executing pstree, that way you can see how the screen process is run.

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

Even better when cd automatically invokes pushd.
- cd - undoes the last cd. Not quite push/popd but still useful. Pro tip, works also: git checkout -
- what's your alias?

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.

This is because $HOME/bin is in your $PATH environment variable. You can add more paths that you'd like to execute scripts from, like a personal git repo that contains your scripts.
I think the standard is ~/.local/bin, for the people that like standards.
or add it to path

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

- Fucking hell Lol 😂
There are dozens of us.

Also, I'll add:

Get-Help

Get-Command

Get-Member

Uhhh...sudo su

Don't be like me

sudo -i

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.

clear. Constantly, and for no reason.

Ctrl-L
- Oh. I know. But you don't understand - I'm compelled to type it out. I must.
- CMD/CTRL-K for me.
haha, I can relate to that :). formerly I had the compulsion to execute sync frequently. Now my compulsion is to push Ctrl-C like 4 times every time I need it. I read somewhere that's common because of ^C has a lack of feedback to the user, so, a script showing an alert that the clipboard received some information helped with this compulsion.
i’d like to introduce you to your new best friend: reset… it doesn’t everything clear does and a LOT more

cd every single day.

You haven't discovered exa? Noob

/s

ls and cd

I sometimes hit ls and then need to type dir.
- The amount of times i tried to dir in linux and ls in windows is mire than I like to admit

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

Related: Alt + ., to cycle through arguments used in previous commands
I just use control C, is there a difference other than whether the line shows up or not?
How about ctrl+c to cancel and clear the command you are typing? It's much easier because you only need 1 hand, and does not impact your shell's history.
And then ctrl+y to paste it back and recover that text.
This is great for when you type in your root password incorrectly!

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).

ls

ls -ltrc

Show most recently modified files.

sl

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.

ll

df -h

du -sch

Ctrl+r

ll

Is an alias for

ls -al

yea?
- I set mine to
  
  ls -lAh
- I have it as ls -alFh

sudo pacman -Syu

I just aliased "sudo pacman -Syu && yay -Syu --aur" to "update" cause I got tired of writing it every day.
- You can just run yay with no arguments and it does exactly what your update script does.
- Wouldn't it make more sense to just yay -Syu to update everything, normal packages and AUR packages?

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 found btop and am trying to use that instead of htop.
- looks up btop ooooo

Btop is an amazing resource monitor

Have you tried glances?
- Never heard of it, looks cool but not as pretty as btop. Also has a ton of information I don't personally care about so for me it doesn't seem great.

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

Example of said Black Magik?
- Let's say, for example, you have a directory of files named x01-001; x01-002; x02-001; x02-002; x03-001... and so on.
  
  I want to create subdirectories for each 'x' iteration and move each set to the corresponding subdirectory. My loop would look like this:
  
  for i in {1..3}; do mkdir Data_x0$i && mv x0$i* Data_x0$i; done
  
  I've also been using it if I need to rename large batches of files quickly.

ncdu

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.

Is there something similar in fish shell?

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.

you ever use ctrl+r ?
- ...I do now!
If you know it was the most recent rsync command: just type !rsync.
Laughs in fish
- I actually use fish on my personal machine. But the servers I manage are pretty basic to save space and all just use stock bash.

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

Neofetch

let me guess, you either use arch or gentoo
- You caught me. (I use arch btw)

sudo

Make me a sandwich.
- LambdaRX is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported

jq

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

Chuck the -y in there for extra lazy mode
- I would but much like somebody else's recent post I have in the past nuked my install by blindly agreeing to some recommended software removals before. These days I like to double check what packages are being updated and replaced.
topgrade does this and and a lot more

nano

The one downvote is from the Vim user
The one downvote is from the Vim user

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

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

g-push which is alias for

git push origin `git branch --show`

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

git push origin HEAD is a slightly shorter way of doing the same thing, even though you have an alias anyway lol
git config --global alias.pusho 'push --set-upstream origin HEAD'

You're welcome.
- So that's making git push always push to the current branch?

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

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

ls -al

I learned you can edit .bashrc (in your home dir) and update the alias for ls to include what I like. It has saved me lots of keystrokes. Mine is ls -lha in addition to whatever color coding stuff is there by default.
- You might like eza even more!
- A lot of distros include a .bashrc with common ls aliases commented out, just waiting for you to activate them if you like.
Another ls alias I'm a fan of is ls -latr which I alias to lt. It gives you a time sorted directory listing with the most recent next to your cursor (helpful for large directories).

I use atuin (link) all the time

history | fzf

Awesome, didn't know fzf yet
Fzf is so useful its ridiculous. I recreated the functionality of sshs with fzf and a small bash script.
Check out the fzf docs. It ships with helpers that offer better shell integration than you're getting here.

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

Try mtr . It'll run kinda like a trace route but will show you where the delay is happening. Still relys in icmp not being blocked
- 'mtr' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
  
  I assume I'm on the wrong OS.

I do love fuck.

And you mistype it as fsck

GNU Parallel

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.

sudo rm -rf /

Very powerful yet helpful command :-)

Someone has to say this. Don't do it anyone
- Agree. Don’t just copy and paste CLI commands you find on the internet, suggested by a stranger
- Instructions unclear, dick now stuck in computer.
- For reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm_(Unix)
  
  The rm -rf / variant of the command, if run by a superuser, would cause every file accessible from the present file system to be deleted from the machine.
The most deceptive joke I've seen on this is sudo rm -fr / to remove the French language pack
I did this on my personal computer just to prove a point.

touch 😏

I remember touch

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.

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).

It sounds similar to one of my favorite commands! vidir 🙂

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

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

compgen -back to see all valid things you can type into a shell.

sudo

doas

ranger

If you change the colours to night mode, the song "Sister Christian" starts playing

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.

Ctrl-R: (type something)

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

Have you heard of our lord and saviour rclone?

I haven't gone back to rsync in a long time.
- I use it to mount cloud storage as network drives... I'll have to look into your implication though!

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

does it do all of those with one press? Id that what the 'A' is for?
- One "exit" per press

rsync

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

flatpak update

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

I trigger it with the up arrow.

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

less, watch

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

Neofetch

Get on with the times, install fastfetch ;)

qalc

$ z

A great cd alternative

Also $ sudo paru -Syu

I think you can run paru without sudo and it should still do privilege escalation no problem
- oh yes, i was thinking about pacman when writing haha

flac -t *

git

Neofetch

I just think it's neat.

It's been abandoned btw. People recommend to switch to alternatives. Fastfetch and hyfetch seem to be the best ones rn.

Though I can't confirm as I wrote my own minimal fetch
- Works just fine for me

<Esc>[2J<Esc>[H

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

Is that easier than typing clear? Also, not sure why you'd say something like that about people's age. Anyone using terminals today is often going to run into weird quirks of them being around for decades even if they're young.
- In the days before *nx, "terminal" meant a VT terminal and "clear" wasn't a thing.