My most important bash script

mlevesquedion — Fri, 15 May 2020 23:46:07 +0000

If you want to do something, make it easy to do.

Applying this principle has allowed me to increase my productivity over time while protecting me from drudgery. Since I spend a lot of time in terminals, a simple example of this is defining appropriate aliases for commands I use a lot, so I don't need to type so much. Sometimes though, an alias doesn't cut it, and I need to write a small script.

Historically, I would cd into a directory on my path, open up a file, write the shebang line, write the script, save it, make it executable, test it, and go back to whatever I was doing. However, since I was always doing those same steps, it made sense to write a script to help me write scripts faster. Here it is :

BIN_PATH="$HOME/bin/"
SCRIPT_NAME="$1"
SCRIPT_PATH="$BIN_PATH$SCRIPT_NAME"

if [ ! -s "$SCRIPT_PATH" ]; then
    echo "#!/bin/bash
" > "$SCRIPT_PATH"
    chmod u+x "$SCRIPT_PATH"
fi

vim "+${2-2}" "$SCRIPT_PATH"

I call it scr, as in script. Say I want to write a new script called foo. All I have to do is type scr foo in a terminal, write the body of the script, save, and I'm done. The next time I want to edit the script, I once again type scr foo, do whatever changes I need to do, save, and I'm done. Since this significantly decreases the effort needed to write scripts, it has allowed me to write more scripts to take care of a variety of tasks I perform often.

I hope this small script, or even the philosophy that inspired it, can be of some use to you.

The most important alias

mlevesquedion — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 01:27:25 +0000

You may have heard of shell aliases. In short, alias is a shell command that defines a substitution, e.g. with alias clip='xclip -selection clipboard' you can type clip in a command and it will be replaced by the part on the right.

I believe aliases are key to a productive and enjoyable command line experience. They are cheap to create and maintain, and they save you a lot of typing.

To me, one alias matters more than any other: alias zc='vim ~/.zshrc'. (feel free to replace vim with your favorite $EDITOR, and .zshrc with your favorite $SHELL).

With this alias, you can improve your development workflow in a snap. Just entered the same command three times in the last five minutes? Open a terminal, enter "zc", alias it, and enjoy.

The actual alias I use is vim -n $ZSHRC; source $ZSHRC. That way my changes are applied immediately upon exiting the file.

For more, see my dotfiles.

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My most important bash script

The most important alias