DEV Community

Command Line Snippets do you keep handy?

Judith on May 12, 2020

Here are a few commands I keep handy: Bash // root login ssh ssh root@my-ip-here // find PID sudo lsof -i : // kill port sudo kill -9 // To re...

Read full post

Ben Halpern • May 12 '20

Remove all local branches except master...

git branch | grep -v "master" | xargs git branch -D

Fábio André Damas • May 20 '20

Inspired by yours but adapted for my use case: delete all branches that are already merged into the current branch safely (doesn't delete branches that aren't fully merged and shows warning):

git branch --merged | grep -v "$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)" | xargs git branch -d

I use this on develop to delete old feature and bugfix branches.

Judith • May 13 '20

OMG yes! very important to have handy :)

Waylon Walker • May 18 '20

Nice one!

Nick Taylor • May 12 '20

I rely heavily on git aliases. I find it really speeds up my workflow. For those interested, here’s my git aliases.

My Git Aliases

Nick Taylor (he/him) ・ Aug 25 '18 ・ 5 min read

#git #productivity #developertools

Judith • May 13 '20 • Edited

Great list! You reminded me of how tweaks to my config have helped a lot too! Here's how to add colors to your console by adding this to your config:

Add colors to your ~/.gitconfig file:

[color]
ui = auto
[color "branch"]
current = yellow reverse
local = yellow
remote = green
[color "diff"]
meta = yellow bold
frag = magenta bold
old = red bold
new = green bold
[color "status"]
added = yellow
changed = green
untracked = cyan

And add this too:
Highlight whitespace in diffs

[color]
ui = true
[color "diff"]
whitespace = red reverse
[core]
whitespace=fix,-indent-with-non-tab,trailing-space,cr-at-eol

Dylan Anderson • May 12 '20

Snippets I've made aliases for

List flag aliases

alias ll='ls -l'
alias ls='ls --color'
alias lh='ll -h'
alias la='ls -a'
alias lla='la -l'

cd alias because I don't always get that space in time

alias cd..='cd ..'

Judith • May 13 '20

awesome!

Waylon Walker • May 18 '20

I love those little ones, where I don't really need this, but my fingers automatically do it in a bit of haste so why not.

Bryce Hipp • May 12 '20 • Edited

A few handy snippets that I've made into aliases

# Get OS X Software Updates, and update installed Ruby gems, Homebrew, npm, and their installed packages
alias update='sudo softwareupdate -i -a; brew update; brew upgrade; brew cleanup; npm install npm -g; npm update -g; sudo gem update --system; sudo gem update'

# Clear out node_modules and re-install everything
alias yarn.please="printf 'Removing node_modules folder...' && rm -rf node_modules && yarn"
alias npm.please="printf 'Removing node_modules folder...' && rm -rf node_modules && npm i"

Judith • May 13 '20

great suggestions!

Frederico Freire Boaventura • May 13 '20

Hi!

Just as an advice, take real care with this:

// remove a repo
find . -type f | grep -i ".git" | xargs rm
cd ..
rm -rf

I've made a quick setup just to illustrate, but let me explain the inner workings of these commands, specially the find and grep combination, that is the dangerous part here.

The tree I have here is:

Where the blue items are folders and the gray are files.

find . -type f will search and print all the files, starting on the actual folder up to all levels downward. And the grep -i ".git" will match to anything that has <any_ character>[gG][iI][tT], at any part of the name.

So, on my special and quick setup, I'll get this result::

» find . -type f | grep -i '.git'
./.git/configure
./.git/HEAD
./folder1/agitos
./.gitignore
./.gitattributes
./agitar/aaa
./agitar/a/1
./agitar/a/2
./agitar/a/3
./agitar/a/4
./agitar/a/5
./agitar/a/6
./agitar/b/1
./agitar/b/2
./agitar/b/3
./agitar/b/4
./agitar/b/5
./agitar/b/6
./agitar/c/1
./agitar/c/2
./agitar/c/3
./agitar/c/4
./agitar/c/5
./agitar/c/6

This is definitely not the expected behavior, and is quite easy to be achieved (believe me :) ). If you pass this result into the xargs rm you may end up removing a lot of undesired files. And you have to take extra care wit this, because asking file by file if you want it to be deleted isn't the default behavior of the rm command. On RedHat, CentOS and Fedora there is an alias rm=rm -i, to make the confirmation mandatory by default.

cd .. is going up one level on the folders, and the rm -rf without any other arguments is doing absolutely nothing, but leaves space for a disaster.

My advice, when you want to remove a repository from a folder, is to make sure you are removing the right folder, so pass the complete path to the rm command, like so:

rm -rf /home/user/dev/my_program/.git

Always, when using rm -rf pass the complete path to the file/folder you want to remove.

Also, while I'm around, the find command is a real swiss knife. To find and remove the .git folder and remove it you can use (but is hardly not advised to):

find /home/user/dev/my_program -type d -name '.git' -delete

You may want to, for example, find all the repositories inside you home folder:

find /home/user -type d -name '.git'

You can also search for folders/files older than, newer than, ..., ..., ...

Have fun and take care! :)

Judith • May 13 '20

Thank you! That is very very helpful.
Namaste!

Paweł Kowalski • May 13 '20 • Edited

git branch -r | awk '{print $1}' | egrep -v -f /dev/fd/0 <(git branch -vv | grep origin) | awk '{print $1}' | xargs git branch -d

Removes branches that are marked as remote on your machine, but dont exist on origin.

If it complains, replace -d with -D at the end.

Used after git fetch prune.

It keeps branch list tidy and real.

Judith • May 13 '20

excellent!

Brandin Chiu • May 13 '20

When I want to transfer a file to a remote server without going through the security headaches of installing ftp servers:

cat file.txt | ssh me@ip_address "cat > newfile.txt"

Frederico Freire Boaventura • May 13 '20

Hi Brandin!

You may also use:

scp file.txt me@ip_address:newfile.txt

scp file.txt me@ip_address:/var/www/newfile.txt

scp -r folder me@ip_address:

if you don't add anything after the : the file/folder being transfered will be stored on the user's home folder.

Waylon Walker • May 18 '20

I am really bad at storing aliases, and heavily rely on my command line history hand 🤭. I heavily use fzf and its Ctrl-R functionality to fuzzy search my past commands. I can typically get to a previous command within a few keystrokes.

Raymond • May 13 '20

zip -r . Backup.zip
Don't rember if that's the correct one, but I do backup my code a lot to download onto my local machine.

tesla3690 • May 17 '20

test