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When setting up a new aliases file, or having creating a new file.. About every time after editing an aliases file, I source it. This alias makes editing alias a bit easier and they are useful right away. Note if the source failed, it will not echo "aliases sourced".
Sub in vi for your favorite editor, or alter for ksh, sh, etc.
This is for bash - make an alias - also a good blueprint for making aliases that take arguments to functions. If for Solaris use "-size +${1}000000c" to replace "-size +${1}M"
This alias is quicker to type than 'sudo apt-get install', and it automatically says yes to the prompt that shows up sometimes.
This form is used in patches, svn, git etc. And I've created an alias for it:
alias diff='diff -Naur --strip-trailing-cr'
The latter option is especially useful, when somebody in team works in Windows; could be also used in commands like
svn diff --diff-cmd 'diff --strip-trailing-cr'...
Sets an alias to remote desktop to the specified console, along with options to ensure the RDP session takes up the whole screen, includes a home directory mapping, and clipboard mappings.
Bash alias for easy irssi within screen, attempts to attach to existing irssi session, if one exists, otherwise creates one - Including wipe for when system reboots and leaves "dead" session.
make, find and a lot of other programs can take a lot of time. And can do not. Supppose you write a long, complicated command and wonder if it will be done in 3 seconds or 20 minutes. Just add "R" (without quotes) suffix to it and you can do other things: zsh will inform you when you can see the results.
You can replace zenity with other X Window dialogs program.
This is freaking sweet!!! Here is the full alias, (I didn't want to cause display problems on commandlinefu.com's homepage):
alias tarred='( ( D=`builtin pwd`; F=$(date +$HOME/`sed "s,[/ ],#,g" <<< ${D/${HOME}/}`#-%F.tgz); S=$SECONDS; tar --ignore-failed-read --transform "s,^${D%/*},`date +${D%/*}.%F`,S" -czPf "$"F "$D" && logger -s "Tarred $D to $F in $(($SECONDS-$S)) seconds" ) & )'
Creates a .tgz archive of whatever directory it is run from, in the background, detached from current shell so if you logout it will still complete. Also, you can run this as many times as you want, if the archive .tgz already exists, it just moves it to a numbered backup '--backup=numbered'. The coolest part of this is the transformation performed by tar and sed so that the archive file names are automatically created, and when you extract the archive file it is completely safe thanks to the transform command.
If you archive lets say /home/tombdigger/new-stuff-to-backup/ it will create the archive /home/#home#tombdigger#new-stuff-to-backup#-2010-11-18.tgz Then when you extract it, like tar -xvzf #home#tombdigger#new-stuff-to-backup#-2010-11-18.tgz instead of overwriting an existing /home/tombdigger/new-stuff-to-backup/ directory, it will extract to /home/tombdigger/new-stuff-to-backup.2010-11-18/
Basically, the tar archive filename is the PWD with all '/' replaced with '#', and the date is appended to the name so that multiple archives are easily managed. This example saves all archives to your $HOME/archive-name.tgz, but I have a $BKDIR variable with my backup location for each shell user, so I just replaced HOME with BKDIR in the alias.
So when I ran this in /opt/askapache/SOURCE/lockfile-progs-0.1.11/ the archive was created at /askapache-bk/#opt#askapache#SOURCE#lockfile-progs-0.1.11#-2010-11-18.tgz
Upon completion, uses the universal logger tool to output its completion to syslog and stderr (printed to your terminal), just remove that part if you don't want it, or just remove the '-s ' option from logger to keep the logs only in syslog and not on your terminal.
Here's how my syslog server recorded this..
2010-11-18T00:44:13-05:00 gravedigger.askapache.com (127.0.0.5) [user] [notice] (logger:) Tarred /opt/askapache/SOURCE/lockfile-progs-0.1.11 to /askapache-bk/tarred/#opt#SOURCE#lockfile-progs-0.1.11#-2010-11-18.tgz in 4 seconds
Caveats
Really this is very robust and foolproof, the only issues I ever have with it (I've been using this for years on my web servers) is if you run it in a directory and then a file changes in that directory, you get a warning message and your archive might have a problem for the changed file. This happens when running this in a logs directory, a temp dir, etc.. That's the only issue I've ever had, really nothing more than a heads up.
Advanced:
This is a simple alias, and very useful as it works on basically every linux box with semi-current tar and GNU coreutils, bash, and sed.. But if you want to customize it or pass parameters (like a dir to backup instead of pwd), check out this function I use.. this is what I created the alias from BTW, replacing my aa_status function with logger, and adding $SECONDS runtime instead of using tar's --totals
function tarred ()
{
local GZIP='--fast' PWD=${1:-`pwd`} F=$(date +${BKDIR}/%m-%d-%g-%H%M-`sed -u 's/[\/\ ]/#/g'
[[ ! -r "$PWD" ]] && echo "Bad permissions for $PWD" 1>&2 && return 2;
( ( tar --totals --ignore-failed-read --transform "s@^${PWD%/*}@`date +${PWD%/*}.%m-%d-%g`@S" -czPf $F $PWD && aa_status "Completed Tarp of $PWD to $F" ) & )
}
#From my .bash_profile http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html
5 helpful aliases for using the which utility, specifically for the GNU which (2.16 tested) that is included in coreutils.
Which is run first for a command. Same as type builtin minus verbosity
alias which='{ command alias; command declare -f; } | command which --read-functions --read-alias'
Which (a)lias
alias whicha='command alias | command which --read-alias'
Which (f)unction
alias whichf='command declare -f | command which --read-functions'
Which e(x)ecutable file in PATH
alias whichx='command which'
Which (all) alias, function, builtin, and files in PATH
alias whichall='{ command alias; command declare -f; } | command which --read-functions --read-alias -a'
# From my .bash_profile http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html
Normally the bash builtin command 'set' displays all vars and functions. This just shows the vars. Useful if you want to see different output then env or declare or export.
Alias 'sete' shows sets variables
alias sete='set|sed -n "/^`declare -F|sed -n "s/^declare -f \(.*\)/\1 ()/p;q"`/q;p"'
Alias setf shows the functions.
alias setf='set|sed -n "/^`declare -F|sed -n "s/^declare -f \(.*\)/\1 ()/p;q"`/,\$p"'
At the very least, some cool sed commands!
From my .bash_profile http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html
When debugging an ssh connection either to optimize your settings ie compression, ciphers, or more commonly for debugging an issue connecting, this alias comes in real handy as it's not easy to remember the '-o LogLevel=DEBUG3' argument, which adds a boost of debugging info not available with -vvv alone.
Especially useful are the FD info, and the setup negotiation to create a cleaner, faster connection.
This uses some tricks I found while reading the bash man page to enumerate and display all the current environment variables, including those not listed by the 'env' command which according to the bash docs are more for internal use by BASH. The main trick is the way bash will list all environment variable names when performing expansion on ${!A*}. Then the eval builtin makes it work in a loop.
I created a function for this and use it instead of env. (by aliasing env).
This is the function that given any parameters lists the variables that start with it. So 'aae B' would list all env variables starting wit B. And 'aae {A..Z} {a..z}' would list all variables starting with any letter of the alphabet. And 'aae TERM' would list all variables starting with TERM.
aae(){ local __a __i __z;for __a in "$@";do __z=\${!${__a}*};for __i in `eval echo "${__z}"`;do echo -e "$__i: ${!__i}";done;done; }
And my printenv replacement is:
alias env='aae {A..Z} {a..z} "_"|sort|cat -v 2>&1 | sed "s/\\^\\[/\\\\033/g"'
From: http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html
This is an alias you can add to your .bashrc file to get notified when a job you run in a terminal is done.
example of use
sleep 20; alert
Source:http://www.webupd8.org/2010/07/get-notified-when-job-you-run-in.html
If a tmux session is already running attach it, otherwise create a new one. Useful if you often forget about running tmuxes (or just don't care)
* Add comment with # in your command
* Later you can search that command on that comment with CTRL+R
In the title command, you could search it later by invoking the command search tool by first typing CTRL+R and then typing "revert"
Once you get into advanced/optimized scripts, functions, or cli usage, you will use the sort command alot. The options are difficult to master/memorize however, and when you use sort commands as much as I do (some examples below), it's useful to have the help available with a simple alias. I love this alias as I never seem to remember all the options for sort, and I use sort like crazy (much better than uniq for example).
# Sorts by file permissions
find . -maxdepth 1 -printf '%.5m %10M %p\n' | sort -k1 -r -g -bS 20%
00761 drwxrw---x ./tmp
00755 drwxr-xr-x .
00701 drwx-----x ./askapache-m
00644 -rw-r--r-- ./.htaccess
# Shows uniq history fast
history 1000 | sed 's/^[0-9 ]*//' | sort -fubdS 50%
exec bash -lxv
export TERM=putty-256color
Taken from my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html
If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command.
# creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com
ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/`date +git-$USER@$HOSTNAME-%m-%d-%g` -C 'webmaster@askapache.com'
# /home/gpl/.ssh/git-gplnet@askapache.github.com-04-22-10
# create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory
tar -czf $(date +$HOME/.backups/%m-%d-%g-%R-`sed -u 's/\//#/g' <<< $PWD`.tgz) .
# tar -czf /home/gpl/.backups/04-22-10-01:13-#home#gpl#.rr#src.tgz .
I personally find myself having to reference
date --help
quite a bit as a result. So this nice alias saves me a lot of time. This is one bdash mofo. Works in sh and bash (posix), but will likely need to be changed for other shells due to the parameter substitution going on.. Just extend the sed command, I prefer sed to pretty much everything anyways.. but it's always preferable to put in the extra effort to go for as much builtin use as you can. Otherwise it's not a top one-liner, it's a lazyboy recliner.
Here's the old version:
alias dateh='date --help|sed "/^ *%%/,/^ *%Z/!d;s/ \+/ /g"|while read l;do date "+ %${l/% */}_${l/% */}_${l#* }";done|column -s_ -t'
This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ]
Run the alias command, then issue
ps aux | head
and resize your terminal window (putty/console/hyperterm/xterm/etc) then issue the same command and you'll understand.
${LINES:-`tput lines 2>/dev/null||echo -n 12`}
Insructs the shell that if LINES is not set or null to use the output from `tput lines` ( ncurses based terminal access ) to get the number of lines in your terminal. But furthermore, in case that doesn't work either, it will default to using the deafault of 12 (-2 = 10).
The default for HEAD is to output the first 10 lines, this alias changes the default to output the first x lines instead, where x is the number of lines currently displayed on your terminal - 2. The -2 is there so that the top line displayed is the command you ran that used HEAD, ie the prompt.
Depending on whether your PS1 and/or PROMPT_COMMAND output more than 1 line (mine is 3) you will want to increase from -2. So with my prompt being the following, I need -7, or - 5 if I only want to display the commandline at the top. ( http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html )
275MB/748MB
[7995:7993 - 0:186] 06:26:49 Thu Apr 08 [askapache@n1-backbone5:/dev/pts/0 +1] ~
In most shells the LINES variable is created automatically at login and updated when the terminal is resized (28 linux, 23/20 others for SIGWINCH) to contain the number of vertical lines that can fit in your terminal window. Because the alias doesn't hard-code the current LINES but relys on the $LINES variable, this is a dynamic alias that will always work on a tty device.
I use this alias in my bashrc. The --vi-keys option makes info use vi-like and less-like key bindings.
For vi(m) users :
Add it in your ~/.bashrc
Add an "exit" @ the end if you are masochist ;)
This uses mpg123 to convert the files to wav before burning, but you can use mplayer or mencoder or ffmpeg or lame with the --decode option, or whatever you like.
Put this in your ~/.bashrc file (or the equivalent)
If you use vim a lot, this alias will be immediately obvious. Your brain will thank you.
In Bash, when defining an alias, one usually loses the completion related to the function used in that alias (that completion is usually defined in /etc/bash_completion using the complete builtin).
It's easy to reuse the work done for that completion in order to have smart completion for our alias.
That's what is done by this command line (that's only an example but it may be very easy to reuse).
Note 1 : You can use given command line in a loop "for old in apt-get apt-cache" if you want to define aliases like that for many commands.
Note 2 : You can put the output of the command directly in your .bashrc file (after the ". /etc/bash_completion") to always have the alias and its completion