Dirty tip: How to remember weird commands you sometimes need

We all have these cases where an annoying problem pops up every now and then, fixing them thoroughly is not necessarily a priority, you don't have the time to dig into them, you just need a quick fix.

And sometimes these issues repeat themselves and, again, you just have a thousand more important things to do.

Let me give you an example.

Every now and then PostgreSQL stops working on my Mac.

As it turns out, it's caused by a dirty shutdown, like the battery dying. From the scope of this article, it doesn't really matter.

I've learned that the solution to my problem is the following command:

rm -f /usr/local/var/postgres/postmaster.pid

Now I don't know about you, but my brain is not compatible with learning this path. Yet, I have to type it every two weeks or so.

What I do is prefix it with a non-command token. It looks like this:

POSTGRESFIX rm -f /usr/local/var/postgres/postmaster.pid

Now, every time I need this, I just have to type history | grep POSTGRESFIX and voilà. It yield a command not found with no side effects, but it gets stored in your history.

This could mean turning one problem into another: you have to remember the tokens you've used.

What I do is I include FIX in all of them. That way, history | grep FIX will bring up a list of all the commands that I need but I don't like or don't bother to learn.

This is dirty, it might not sound like a professional solution. But sometimes we need to move fast and these things are okay.

Comments

[Dimitrios Desyllas]

AFAIK Unix-based systems that rely on bash such as Linux and FreeBSD allows you to provide aliases just edit your .bashrc and place the following allias:

alias POSTGRESFIX="rm -f /usr/local/var/postgres/postmaster.pid"

So once you type POSTGRESFIX in shell environment, problem gets fixed.

[Dimitrios Desyllas]

Also, most GNU/Linux distros using bash, have a specified test file for aliases in your home folder named .bash_aliases, allowing to place any alias declaration there.

Though, I am not too sure in MacOs because Idk how MasOs has setup bash on their OS.

[Ben Sinclair]

Turn them into aliases!

 history | grep '[A-Z]FIX' | sed -e 's/^[ 0-9]*//' -e 's/ /="/' -e 's/$/"/' >> ~/.bashrc

[Cserei Zoltán]

this one is really nice, thanks!

[Dimitrios Desyllas]

So I think you can try it on the MAC.