What do you Google EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. and never just memorize?

Ben Halpern Oct 19 '17 ・1 min read

#discuss

DISCUSS (249)

Amin Arria

Oct 19 '17

How to make a tar file...

damian

Oct 19 '17

at least extracting is easy (say it in a german accent) tar -xzf "xtract ze files"

Chrissy Wainwright

Oct 20 '17

and -czf == 'compress ze files'

Amin Mohamed Ajani

Oct 23 '17

well what works for me is tar -xzvf "xtract ze vucking files"
No kidding that's how remember it

THREAD

Liz Rodriguez

Oct 23 '17

this...is actually brilliant! lol

Amin Arria

Oct 20 '17

That's a great way! Jajajaaj

But it's important to note that tar is smart enough to detect the format so I prefer the general tar -vxf

Thank you so much.

Even though as a German with decent English pronunciation this is a little bit insulting, I'll probably never forget this ever again. Thanks! 🙈

Jonas Gauffin

Jun 15 '18

Isn't that for zipped tar files? -xzf = extract zipped (tar) file.

tbodt

Oct 21 '17

B. Agustín Amenábar Larraín

Jun 25 '18

I threw this one at a dev I used to work with. He answered instantly, he could have disarmed 2 bombs with that speed.

Instant respect gained

Sanjayshr

Oct 23 '17

I figured out how to remember it. To create tar, use c option and for extracting replace c with x ==> $tar will remain same for both Lol :) . tar -cvf filename.tar file/dir_path && tar -xvf filename.tar.

Kevin Le

Oct 19 '17

regex

Stefan Hecker

Oct 20 '17

The same with me!! But I found VerbalExpressions (github.com/VerbalExpressions) to have solved it for me.

Kevin Le

Oct 23 '17

That is very good to know about.

Ferocit

Nov 2 '17

I usually just go to regexr.com and trial-and-error the syntax until it matches what I want.

Ryan Haber

Oct 20 '17

Regex kills me sometimes.

Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers

Oct 19 '17

How to find out which process is listening on a certain point on my mac. I'm often switching between projects, and have a server from another project running on a port that I now need for another server.

And it looks like Heroku's CLI doesn't always stop all processes correctly when you stop it using ctrl+c

Palle

Oct 21 '17

You could add a function to your .bashrc to make this easier:

listening() {
    lsof -n -iTCP:$1 | grep LISTEN
}

Then (after restarting your terminal or typing source ~/.bashrc) type listening 8080 to find out what process is blocking that port.

Andy Zhao

Oct 19 '17

How to properly write a Rails migration file.

Add a column? Huh? What???

Ben Halpern

Author

Oct 19 '17

Oh yeah. I always copy and paste from old files.

Ukaza Perdana

Dec 30 '17

IIRC:

rails g migration AddStuffToTableName new_column1:integer new_column2:text #etc. etc.

Valentin Baca

Oct 19 '17

Converting Array<->List in Java*. Been coding Java for 6+ years and still don't care to learn/memorize this.
Objective-C block syntax
bash test format and flags
vim macro create and execute

I noticed I could never remember these, so I always make aliases, shell functions, or short ~/bin/ scripts for them instead:

tar: xkcd.com/1168/
netstat flags (other than "-tulpn" which I have memorized as "tull-pin" like "Tolkien")
ssh tunnel syntax

Edit: *in one-line.
Array to list:

String[] array = ...;
List<String> immutableList = Arrays.asList(array);
List<String> mutableList = new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList(array));

List to array:

List<String> list = ...;
String[] array = list.toArray(new String[list.size()]);

Clear as mud...

Oscar

Jul 11 '18

Helpful protip. I learned yesterday, that list.toArray(new String[0]) is faster than the version with the explicit size given.

Lynne Tye

Oct 19 '17

I was about to write the same thing. How to vertically align elements... without using flex 😂

Jess Lee

Nov 16 '17

RAILS MIGRATION

Sarah Chima

Oct 19 '17

Regex. While I understand how it works and how it can be used, it's difficult for me to memorize the right regex that should be used at every point. So I just google whenever I want to make use of it. :)

Ben Halpern

Author

Oct 19 '17

Oh yeah that's a big one

Tiago Marques

Oct 20 '17

I was just like that... but then I've found regex101.com/ and now, I'm almost proficiente writing regex!

gustavo

Nov 2 '17

regex101 is the single best resource I've ever found for regex.

Miff

Nov 2 '17

It's funny in my case. I know enough regex to get by, but I generally need to google to find out how to actually apply it.

Do I need RegExp.prototype.test or String.prototype.match in JS? What are the order of parameters in preg_match in PHP? What are the little parentheses things called in .NET, captures or groups?

Andrew

Nov 2 '17

I had the same problem, until I found Rubular:

rubular.com/

Bonus tip: making a permalink will also save all the test cases used. Makes for an excellent inline comment!

Roger Paviani

Oct 20 '17

Same here...
BTW, I knew someone must've been written about regular expressions when I read the title.. 😂

Kwabena Bio Berko

Oct 19 '17

Me too!
Hahaaahaa

George Offley

Oct 20 '17

I always have to Google regex. Or copied old code.

Reynaldo Jose Abreu

Oct 20 '17

Same here. I can only remember $,^,*,+ and /s /w. I always end up up googling an example and going from there.

Jens Genberg

Oct 20 '17

I can never remember how it works either. I found this to be helpful, though! regexr.com/

Ben Halpern

Author

Oct 19 '17

For me it's "manually start postgresql"

Every once in a while my postgres server isn't running and I know to punch that into my browser and land on this Stack Overflow question, where I proceed to copy this command into my terminal:

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start

It happens infrequently enough that I never bother to alias it or remember how to type it out. I just remember what to Google.

Galdin Raphael

Oct 19 '17

I have postgres installed via homebrew. So I use brew info postgres to copy the start command :)

lepinekong

May 25 '18

So did I then I realize how many precious minutes of my life I'm losing so I decided to buy a domain for 75 cents mycodesnippets.space :) I write things down little by little as soon as I need it the first time or I risk to never do it by lazyness !

Srikanth

Feb 11 '18

I was gonna say this. Have bookmarked the stackoverflow post on this. :D

Kwaku Eshun

Oct 19 '17

Oh yes, I even googled and used this today because my service keeps stopping.

Kaustav Banerjee

Oct 19 '17

cant you just sudo service postgresql start ? :P

shelby spees

Aug 11 '18

On Linux, yes. On OSX, no unfortunately.

Liz Rodriguez

Oct 23 '17

I could never remember "rails new myapp --database=postgresql" :|

Dave Jacoby

Oct 19 '17

sed and awk and how to use them.

Tony

Oct 20 '17

Creating SSH Keys

Martin Kiesel

Jun 4 '18

I just ssh-k ↑ in zsh and just list all previous key generation commands or if I am not sure what I am looking for I use fzf

# fh - repeat history
fh() {
  print -z $( ([ -n "$ZSH_NAME" ] && fc -l 1 || history) | fzf +s --tac | sed 's/ *[0-9]* *//')
}

Chad Kunde

Apr 28 '18

I was helping someone with this earlier this year. Ended up creating a helper for it:

gist.github.com/Kunde21/3633e1e9ef...

Mathieu PATUREL

Oct 19 '17

Suprised tldr didn't got mentioned.

It's a pretty neat tool to do this kind of things...

ImTheDeveloper

Oct 20 '17

Best link I've seen all week. Heroic!!!!!

@ScottFred

Apr 26 '18

That's awesome! thanks

Aidan Harding

Oct 20 '17

Javascript array methods. Is this one in-place, or returning a new array? I don't know, but MDN does!

Andy Zhao

Oct 20 '17

And centering things. Completely clueless every time.

Andrew

Nov 2 '17

here's a handy multiple choice questionnaire!

howtocenterincss.com/

THREAD

Michael Minshew

Apr 9 '18

holy crap, whoever made this site needs a medal. Great recommendation!!!

Ahmed T. Ali

Oct 19 '17

How to extract tar.gz file in Linux command line!

Dean Bassett

Oct 20 '17

Saw a comment from above and it changed my life.

tar -xzf filename xzf = "Xtract Ze Files!" (german accent)

ErwanDavid

Oct 21 '17

Excellent, noté that you may get ride of the dash.

Galdin Raphael

Oct 19 '17

tar -xf filename

Read as tar eXtract File filename.
Saw this on an SO answer and never had to google it ever again :)

Ahmed T. Ali

Oct 20 '17

Wow, I never thought of it.

Thanks :)

Michael TD

Oct 19 '17

I've got your back fam...
github.com/MichaelTd/libBash/blob/...

ImTheDeveloper

Oct 19 '17

Everything git related

harry_wood

Apr 24 '18

Yeah. For some reason I really find some git procedures harder to memorise than others. It's ludicrous the number of times I've googled "git unadd a file" and "git reset branch to remote"

Igal Tabachnik

Oct 20 '17

How to delete a remote branch in git.

Barney Wilks

Mar 18 '18

Oh boy, this gets me every. Single. Time.

ItsASine (Kayla)

Oct 21 '17

Cherry picking commits in git, because I can never remember if it's cherrypick or cherry-pick

A more efficient way would be to just do it and correct if it errors, or alias it to git cherry or something

Also, how to exit vim, and how to insert in vim, and basically how on Earth did I end up in vim omg get me out

Eljay-Adobe

Jun 11 '18

I've been using Vim now for about 24 years. Primarily because I don't know how to quit.

Bart Karalus

Oct 20 '17

I would be responsible for 95% of hits coming from google search into the Tutorialpoint's html5 minimal template. Now I could easily type it in every time I set up a new page, but it is now a matter of extreme laziness I think.

Sakib Hadžiavdić

Oct 19 '17

How to "unignore" files with git... Here is a nice and short way.

Paula

Oct 19 '17

This is stupid but g++ compiling filename and output order in the terminal. I've been doing it for four years now and still failing to remember.

Loïc Giraudel

Oct 20 '17

ln -s [source] [destination] or ln -s [destination] [source] ?
find . -name [...] -exec grep '...' {} \;

And of course sed, awk and more generally shell syntax (if, loops, switch, etc).

Šimon Let

Jun 17 '18

I got a good way to remember argument order for ln:
Destination is optional so it must go second.
By default ln creates a link with the name of the source in the current directory.

JSn1nj4

Jun 16 '18

Oh yeah, linking. Forgot about that one (obviously, since I need to Google it every time lol).

Sourav Ghosh

Oct 20 '17

How to exit vim.

Michael Whitis

Oct 20 '17

Many moons ago, at one of my first jobs, I got myself in trouble with this. I was editing something in prod without knowing how to save or exit. I was a windows nt guy mostly. So, like one does, I hard-rebooted the server instead of asking for help... After the dust cleared, my boss made me sit at a keyboard for over an hour launching vim and learning how to at least save and exit. :) I have :wq, :q,:q! burned into my muscle memory to this day...

shelby spees

Aug 11 '18

Oh god why did they have the new guy making changes in prod you poor soul

George Offley

Oct 20 '17

How to spell maintenance.

Albrecht Scheidig

Oct 25 '17

That's unneccessarrelly, but true.

Angelika Tyborska

Oct 20 '17

This! Plus a few other words: convenient, conscience, accommodate. I'm not a native speaker ;).

Jim Schubert

Feb 10 '18

I don't have to Google the spelling, but I'd say 99% of the time I type "valud". I say it correctly as "val-id" and only mistype because of the QWERTY keyboard layout. This is the only word that I consistently type incorrectly. It's not a speed thing (like "teh"), because it happens when typing slowly as well. I've been typing for a really long time and I'm beginning to think my brain just thinks this is a funny prank.

Robin | JamesDev

Oct 22 '17

As a non native english speaker:

slice()

splice()

Brett Stevenson

Oct 19 '17

Usually, anything that is outside of my basic Git workflow.

Rob Cameron

Oct 19 '17

Find a file in Linux. I know it involves "find" and "name" but I have to look up the exact syntax each time. (For reference, the sledgehammer version is find . -name testfile.txt from the root of the drive.)

Gilberto Alexandre dos Santos

Oct 20 '17

PHP array_push and array_key_exists parameters order.

Daan Wilmer

Nov 5 '17

Argument orders in all array functions in PHP for me. That's just horrible. VSCode gives hints though, so that helps. I still have to look up the exact names of functions regularly, though.

Janne "Lietu" Enberg

Oct 20 '17

this alone should tell you you need to use another language ;)

Anton Linevych

Mar 22 '18

How to type this: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Den McHenry

Jun 16 '18

The best thing they ever added to Slack was the /shrug command.

Ben Halpern

Author

Mar 22 '18

Ha! Me too. I know to go straight to textfac.es

Alejandro

Oct 21 '17

text-overflow: ellipsis

Kasey Speakman

Oct 19 '17

Updating the list of git remote branches. It doesn't refresh when you sync so it will continue to list remote branches that don't even exist anymore until you manually run the command below. (Which I had to google again to put in this comment.)

git remote update origin --prune

shelby spees

Aug 11 '18

Git, brew, and bundler all have some kind of prune flag so it's starting to stick for me.

Oleksandr

Feb 13 '18

easy to remember because it is like dried fruit!

Aswath KNM

Oct 20 '17

unzip a tar file especially with that different extensions .xz , .bz etc..

vim commands to cut,copy and paste

regex in python and other python builtins . Can't memorize the whole docs right ?

Aaron Santos

Dec 22 '17

vim...

Javier Guerra

Oct 23 '17

How to flush DNS cache on OSX

Matt Durr

Feb 10 '18

I literally added an alias to my ZSH config for this one

alias flushdns='sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder'

Christopher McClellan

Oct 20 '17

Setting firewall rules with iptables.

Syntactic Sugar

Feb 10 '18

Ever heard of ufw?

Sung M. Kim

Apr 8 '18

I always Google how to create a webpack configuration file.
- You need to be a 🚀👨‍🔬 to configure it from memory.
Adding a style tag for CSS files 😝.

Hudson Burgess

Oct 20 '17

"How to do x in CSS" where x is anything

juankOrtiz

Apr 12 '18

My first choice was "Regex", but it seems you guys beat me to that choice.

So, without a shame I can say that everytime I search "how to insert an element at the end of another with jquery". Frigging append(), man.

shelby spees

Aug 11 '18

What gets me is when I'm switching between languages. Java uses add, Python has append, and Ruby uses push. But then some gem will use add.

This is why I shamelessly use IDEs while everyone I work with uses vim.

David Vincent Gagne

Oct 21 '17

MySQL and PHP date formatting. Every time. What’s weekday again?

Marco Alka

Oct 20 '17

flexbox and grid with all their different attributes and values :/

Jonathan Solis

Oct 20 '17

How to git checkout a remote branch. I’m gonna try it it without googling

git remote add repoFork <url>
git fetch repoFork
git checkout —track repoFork/branch

I hope that’s right I just looked it up again yesterday

Brian Hanna

Oct 21 '17

The arguments for JavaScript's array.slice method. Every. Damn. Time.

Max Antonucci

Oct 20 '17

Vim commands.

Just...I can't even.

Andrew

Nov 2 '17

ever play:

vim-adventures.com/

bonus tip: a lot of unix commands support vim keys by default. i.e. less and man

Florian Rohrer

Oct 20 '17

How to use grep and find.
Also when I write data = {} in Python, is this a set or a dict?

Ahmed T. Ali

Oct 23 '17

This can't be a Set

data = {}

It's always a dictionary!
If you want an empty Set use:

data = set()

P.S. it's handy to use the official Python REPL and type type(youvariable) ;)

Dylan

Jun 15 '18

Everything! 🤪
But seriously, I think I do a lot of Googling (and looking at Documentation - same thing?) for things which are new or I'm uncertain of or if I'm working with an SDK like Firebase.
Is that the way I'm supposed to do it? 😂 I'd rather get things right first time rather than get it wrong and THEN Google. Sounds like the other things people Google are a lot more advanced. 😳