What are your UNIX pipeline commands that saved you from lot of coding/time?

This question came to my mind last day when I wanted to free up some space on my HDDs and when it comes to what to delete (feel the pain), I wanted to know without lot of right-clicks which folders are the fattiest. As a good Windows user, I installed Total Commander, because some random Google result told me to do so.

Then I realised, heck, I have an entire UNIX environment on my PC (MSYS2), so maybe there is an utterly simple one liner command for achieve this. And guess what, it has: :)

$ du -sh * | sort -h

Life hack, place this in your .bashrc file:

# Within the current directory, list all folders and files
# and print their size, then sort it from smallest to largest:
alias du='du -sh * | sort -h'

What are your UNIX pipeline commands, where you can combine some program's standard output and creating something wicked simple time saver?

Comments

[Sérgio Araújo]

Not exactly pipes but some very useful aliases that sometimes save me a lot of keystrokes

# open the last edited file with neovim
alias lnvim='nvim -c'\'':e#<1'\'
alias pbpaste='xclip -i -selection clipboard -o'
alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'

zsh global aliases:

alias -g ND='./**/*(/om[1])' # newest directory --> ls -d ND
alias -g NF='./**/*(.om[1])' # newest file

cd ~/music/recordings && audacity NF
# using fasd cd I just type
z recor<Enter> auda<Tab> NF

Also using zsh with:

1 - fasd cd
2 - zsh-autosuggestions
3 - zsh-autopar

But xargs combined with find like:

 find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t ~/backup

print0 and xargs -0 makes us avoid some erros comming from files with spaces on its names

[Thibault Milan]

I know it's about pipe commande but since I saw some other interesting elements without pipe in it, I want to share some of them that help me daily. Hope you don't mind.

I have multiple aliases in my .aliases but some also in my .gitconfig more specific to git.
My favorite one is :

[alias]
        # Remove branches that have already been merged with master
    # a.k.a. ‘delete merged’
    dm = "!git branch --merged | grep -v '\\*' | xargs -n 1 git branch -d"
        # List contributors with number of commits
    contributors = shortlog --summary --numbered
        # pull repository, rebasing, by auto stashing before and restore after and prune"
        up = "pull --rebase --autostash --prune"

You can find more of them into my .dotfiles repo on github

[SpeedMeUp]

Top client IP in apache logs.

# cut -d" " -f1 apache.access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
 349963 22.208.1.241
  16434 15.99.2.62
   8685 7.8.27.98
   2047 52.14.4.76
    265 83.12.37.3
    149 3.71.24.250
     78 14.213.14.6
     13 182.37.3.88

Work also for any field : top URL, top browser etc. Damn fast !

[Bert Van Vreckem]

topcmd ()
{ 
    history | awk '{a[$4]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
}

This prints the top 10 most used commands in the history. I then created one-letter aliases for these (e.g. alias s='git status'), saving numerous keystrokes.

[motilevy]

hgrep () {
        grep --color=auto --color -E "$1|$" "${@:2}"
}

this will just highlight the word you are greping for but still print out the entire file.

[Cristian Stroparo]

I have some personal libraries that are easily installable in other hosts, by following the README:

github.com/stroparo/ds

I also have a personal setup script which installs my selection of APT (debian/ubuntu) and Yum (fedora/redhat) packages, plus Oh-My-Zsh, plus the Daily Shells ('ds') repo linked to above. Just follow the installation instructions for setup-dev.sh at the bottom of this README:

github.com/stroparo/cmds#setup-a-l...

Best,

[Cristian Stroparo]

Exploded with files + dirs:

du -ma | sort -rn | head # summary (10 items)
du -ma | sort -rn | less # scroll with the 'less' command

[Anton]

I've used this exact line a couple days ago!

[Olivier “Ölbaum” Scherler]

I have a lot of data in JSON format, and gron has been a lifesaver. Combined with the usual suspects grep, sed, cut, awk, sort, etc.

[Nathan Macey]

Cool! This looks a lot simpler than jq (which I use regularly).

[Luciano Quercia]

alias ctrlc='xclip -selection clipboard -i'
alias ctrlv='xclip -selection clipboard -o'

Examples:

# copy something without opening editors or showing it in terminal
cat ~/.ssh/mykey.pub | ctrlc

# paste clipboard somewhere
ctrlv >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts


ctrlv | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
ctrlv | tr -d "\n"
ctrlv | base64 -d 
ctrlv | base64
ctrlv | md5sum

cat myfile | base64 | ctrlc
cat myfile | md5sum | ctrlc



ctrlv | base64 | ctrlc
ctrlv | base64 -d | ctrlc