pestophagous/README.md

A Book For Learning And Using Bash

Several weeks ago, I was at an in-person client meeting where I was getting a walkthrough of how to use a device.

I noticed a book and asked if I could borrow it.

The book:

The Linux Command Line, by William Shotts

I consider myself "very experienced" with the Linux command line already, but I wanted to see if I would recommend this book to other people who are just getting started.

I have read 7 chapters (jumping around a bit), and I am very impressed!

My conclusion: I recommend this book without hesitation.

It has good, compelling examples. It is very readable. It is also well organized, so you can focus on whichever topics are most relevant to you. The author did a great job of calling out related Linux system concepts that are pertinent to various commands.

"One Weird Tool" For Learning And Using Bash

Since 2016, I have been using a bash history tool that saves my bash history forever. (That sounds like an exaggeration but it's really not.)

The original tool:

Keeping persistent history in bash, by Eli Bendersky

My "fork" of it:

https://github.com/pestophagous/endless_bash_history

Using My "One Weird Tool" to Measure the Book's Utility

Since I have kept my bash history since 2016, I realized that I could do an analysis.

I can quantify my own "100 most used bash commands", and then check whether this book teaches about each of them.

The results indeed validate my already strong recommendation of the book.

The "census" of my bash history is also interesting in its own right.

My 100 Most Used Bash Commands (2016-2021)

If you do not recognize a command, click the link to learn about it.

Commands are listed from most-used to least-used.

The number after each command shows how many times the command appears in my bash history, between 2016 and 2021.

Four commands are custom, and are explained at the bottom.

git, 162542
cd, 43973
ls, 43133
grep, 32317
ec (see bottom section), 15779
glof (see bottom section), 12307
cat, 11352
rm, 9963
find, 8569
sudo, 7907
cp, 6072
cdg (see bottom section), 4302
bazel, 3735
mv, 3687
echo, 3302
less, 3269
eog, 2865
mkdir, 2844
diffmerge, 2789
tree, 2735
xargs, 2721
export, 2693
lsfg (see bottom section), 2490
source, 2306
touch, 2030
man, 1592
make, 1539
awk, 1538
ps, 1408
which, 1268
sort, 1244
evince, 1112
docker, 1048
file, 1041
df, 1033
cut, 1024
tail, 979
convert, 936
pushd, 913
killall, 846
pwd, 777
chmod, 767
popd, 763
diff, 750
ssh, 740
ping, 703
head, 690
du, 636
gitk, 615
curl, 608
wc, 543
lsof, 509
On MacOS open, 502
ln, 487
vagrant, 470
ffmpeg, 447
kill, 419
qmake, 414
ifconfig, 410
qmlscene, 399
dmesg, 390
sed, 389
ldd, 381
python3, 376
htop, 346
strings, 313
dot, 301
date, 299
scp, 287
umount, 277
dpkg, 277
clear, 272
psql, 268
unzip, 262
wmctrl, 239
jq, 239
rmdir, 234
fg, 223
type, 222
unset, 220
cmake, 218
mount, 214
tar, 205
pgrep, 187
history, 177
nm, 169
pkill, 166
perl, 159
ipython, 158
wget, 151
env, 147
apt, 145
nmap, 144
lsmod, 144
recordmydesktop, 140
mediainfo, 132
gs, 132
tee, 132
watch, 126
gdb, 123

The Four Custom Commands In My Top 100

ec

A script as follows. It takes any number of filenames and opens them all in an already-running instance of emacs:

#!/bin/bash

# Should now work on linux AND macos:
# https://stackoverflow.com/a/28806991/10278
echo "$@"  | tr ' ' '\0' |  tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 -n1   emacsclient -n

glof

An alias that shows a compact, columnar, colored git log:

git log --color=always -20 --pretty=format:'%C(yellow)%h|%Cred%cd|%Cblue%an|%Cgreen%d %Creset%s' --date=short | awk '{printf("%s\n",$0)}' | column -ts'|' | less -R -X

cdg

An alias that moves the current working directory to the root of whichever git repository you are navigating in:

cd $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)

lsfg

A script as follows. It takes grep arguments and does a recursive grep over only version-controlled files in the git repository you are navigating in. In particular, if there are untracked files (such as build artifacts or local config files ignored by git), then those untracked files will not be grepped through:

#!/bin/bash

MYCLRCMD="--color=always"

if [ -t 1 ] ; then
    true;
    #echo "running in terminal rather than piped to a thing";
else
    MYCLRCMD="--color=auto";
fi

# the `find` invocation (for `-type f`) will stop any version-controlled SYMLINK
# files from moving forward in the pipeline

# this tactic excludes submodules
git grep --cached -l '' | xargs -I {} find "{}" -type f | xargs -I {} grep -Hn $MYCLRCMD "$@" "{}"