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Minimizing Keystrokes, Maximizing Productivity - Bash Scripting

Akshansh Bhanjana on July 12, 2020

If you are more of a minimalist, perhaps terminals are your thing. To allow you to use your terminal to its full potential, let's learn a bit about...

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David • Jul 12 '20 • Edited

Very nice! I'm not much of a shell-scripter and have always found it quite annoying to write them because I do it so rarely. I wrote one to bootstrap a new machine and that was fun (sarcasm). I do, however, love old Unix utilities like awk and sed and would love to use them more for scripting and they're more portable and have less drift than writing Python or Ruby scripts.

The functions are nice! I never quite found a good way to move up multiple directories and do it quite often, but I do it far less now as I rely more on fzf globbing. I think functions have far more utility than aliases as I only keep a handful around and heavily rely on my history -- shameless plug: my post about efficiency in the terminal/shell

Do you have a link to your dotfiles or a repo with the functions that you use? Would love to check 'em out!

Akshansh Bhanjana • Jul 12 '20

Hahaha, indeed, using the shell can sometimes be annoying. Moving up directories continuously is an example :P

I took a look at your post, and it's a great read! reverse-i-search is something I discovered quite late, and wished to have known about it sooner haha.

Sure, I have my dotFiles hosted on GitHub. Though I'd suggest that you look at the .zshrc instead of .bashrc, since I haven't updated the latter in quite a long time.

Thanks for reading!

David • Jul 12 '20 • Edited

Yeap! It's such a rare occurrence for me nowadays, because I literally just keep all the projects that I operate in open with tmux with their sessions auto-saved. They're restored on restarts. Tmux was something that took me a super long time to adopt (start of this year).

Yeah, I feel like reverse-i-search is not mentioned enough. It's spectacular with fzf integration: github.com/junegunn/fzf.

Neat neat! I like that function you've got for git branch, current working directory, and more. You've even got some perl in there. LOL! Wow! Out of curiosity, how did you go about learning all that you know about shell-scripting?

Your .zshrc is so much cleaner LOL. You've even got functions to generate what appears to be checksums. You're probably the first person that I've seen with Dart-lang repos. I always like to ask C++ programmers about Rust -- have you tried it? Thoughts?

Akshansh Bhanjana • Jul 12 '20 • Edited

Ahh, I've never used tmux, but heard a lot of praise! I've been using i3wm for quite a while, and so I just open multiple terminal windows and pretend it's tmux haha. Anyway, I would surely give it a try, as the session-restoring sounds great (and time-saving)!

Looking at fzf, do you also use vim/emacs? I've never gotten around to using them, as I think that it'd take a lot of time to migrate from VSCode to a total keyboard experience, and so I keep postponing trying to learn the shortcuts :P

Haha thanks, I use perl majorly for applying regex into bash strings (like extracting the directory name, CPU Temp, etc.)

I learned all that majorly from other awesome people's articles online, and sometimes through books (e.g. O'Reilly's Learning the bash Shell).

Ahh yes, the checksums function is quite useful. It generates the checksum, checks it against the one you provided as an argument, and returns if the two match. So, for md5 checking, I can simply do

md5 <name_of_file> <given_md5_hash>
# true or false

So yes, I use it a lot :P

I majorly use Dart for mobile development i.e. Flutter. And Rust has been on my list for quite a while now, but never really got around to learning it. From what I've heard, people just call it a better C++ (if that's possible :P). I think I might start soon. Are you planning on learning it, too?

David • Jul 12 '20 • Edited

Yeah, I guess tmux is certainly more for a terminal-based workflow. I can't live without it. Switching windows is all keyboard shortcuts. I figure that i3wm is, too? I'm on macOS, and spent the last two hours looking at Yabai, a super popular tiling window manager for macOS

Yeap! You nailed it. I'm a total Vim-nut, but it's partially because I don't do any sort of dev in ecosystems that have amazing IDEs, like Java, iOS, etc. I try to keep a mouse-less workflow which comes in handy when having only a laptop (before the pandemic began). With regard to fzf, just navigating a filesystem is so much nicer. I use the globbing a lot!

$ cd ** # and I can just start typing the name of some directory that's nested levels deep 

$ rg --files | fzf # list the files in the current directory and fuzzy search / can also pipe ls into fzf, of course

My reverse-i-search becomes this w/ fzf (instead of the standard one-liner):

  2283    git diff -w
  2284    git status
  2285    git add README.md
  2286    git commit -m "UPDATE readme - with 'tools of the trade'"
  2287    git push
  2288    git add -A&&git commit --amend --no-edit
> 2289    git push --force-with-lease
  427/1043 +S
> git

Yeah, your checksum functions are friggen neat! I've saved them :)

Haha -- so I've never really done too much systems programming and reading C++ is pretty straight-forward to me (at least in relation to Leetcode problems). Well, the problem with C++ is the footguns with memory. Right? I think it was only last year or the year before that Google reported two zero-days in Chrome. A large organization with as many resources as they have, has made a valiant effort, but it is still a problem. And it seems like the bulk of CVEs are memory-related. I currently do a little bit of Go which is useful but I really don't like its lack of elegance, though simple, and maintainable. I like modern language facilities and constructs and tooling, vibrant community, but without the memory footguns of C++, which Rust seems to provide (which is also being used on my team at my current company). I plan on learning it, because I'd like to have a performant systems language in my toolbox

Akshansh Bhanjana • Jul 13 '20

Yep, i3wm is also all-keyboard workflow. Honestly, I didn't even know how much time I spent alt+tabbing and moving between windows using my mouse until I started using i3wm. I guess I'd have a similar experience once I switch from VSCode to vim :P

I've heard about Yabai. Probably somewhere in unixporn (SFW), people have some amazing rices there.

Ahh yess, not using a mouse certainly helps with a laptop. Out of curiosity, which laptop do you use? I particularly love MacBook's touchpads (sometimes preferable over a mouse for me).

Wow, your reverse-i-search looks beautiful. Comparing to the one-liner I get hahaha, I'd perhaps try out fzf soon.

I literally just Googled "zero-days" right now :P
Yes, the main problems lie in memory management and garbage collection of C++ (which I believe Rust improves upon?)

The lack of generics in Go really annoyed me, although (finally) they're coming in the next version, so it might be a really interesting time to improve our GoLang skills.

Again, out of curiosity, how long have you been working with C++?

Dan Jones • Jul 16 '20 • Edited

Your cd function could be greatly simplified:

function cd() {
    builtin cd "$@"
    ls
}

cd with no arguments already goes to the home folder. "$@" passes all arguments passed to the function exactly as they were passed. If there were none passed, it passes nothing.

Akshansh Bhanjana • Jul 16 '20

Ahh, this looks great. It was a simple solution, really (should've been obvious to me). Perhaps, I spent a little too time thinking :P

Made the changes. Thanks!

toby • Jul 13 '20

Nice post!

A few small improvements ;)

Aliases and functions normally reside in .bash_aliases rather than the rc file.
gcc may clash with the widespread gnu gcc program which is run using the same command, perhaps gcd could serve the same purpose here
Aliasing in something that adds -a or . in git is not generally considered good practice due to the potential for unexpected results, adding and committing are very specifically separate commands. At best, users should be aware of the possible issues (which others on the internet have explained better than I could)

Akshansh Bhanjana • Jul 15 '20

Thanks for the suggestions!

Yes, I believe putting the aliases and functions in a separate file would immensely clean up the rc files, so I'd be careful to do that from now.

As for the gcc, this never occurred to me as I never really used gcc apart from compiling cpp files with g++. Perhaps, I should add a little note in my post telling others to make sure that the aliases/functions do not try to override any other command :)

Ahh, I'll definitely read up about it; thanks for pointing this out :D

Jakub L. • Jul 15 '20

Using gcc for a function name is not a wise idea. Especially when you cope with C language. ;)

Akshansh Bhanjana • Jul 15 '20

Thanks for the insight!

I realised this quite late 😅
I'll perhaps add a note in my post telling users to make sure not to name functions/aliases such that they override other commands :)

Bhupesh Varshney 👾 • Jul 12 '20

Nice writeup 🔥

Although a small suggestion

alias gc='git add . && git commit -m'

If you meant git add all the changes, than you should update it to git add -A
git add . will only stage changes in current directory, might get confusing if you run this in sub-directories.

Akshansh Bhanjana • Jul 13 '20

Ahh yes, quite rightly pointed out. I'll update it in the post as well.

Thanks for reading!

Vlastimil Pospichal • Jul 16 '20 • Edited

Don't use git add ., use git add --all instead

Try basename.

url="https://github.com/akshansh2000/dotFiles.git"
git clone "$url"
cd "$(basename -s .git "$url")"

alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../..'

Jonathan Boudreau • Jul 12 '20

I often use ctrl+r for history fuzzy search. alt+f to go forward a word, alt+b to go backward a word, etc. I recommend looking into readline's default bindings.

Akshansh Bhanjana • Jul 13 '20

I'd surely do so. Thanks :)

zooperman • Oct 28 '20

Git commit multiple files:
git commit -am "Commit message"