Bash tips for developers

Like many developers, I use the terminal on a daily basis.

I actually use 2 different terminals: the one embedded in VScode and iTerm2 (I'm on macOS). Although this post contains the word bash, I don't use it directly. I use zsh with ohmyzsh. If you never heard about it before, it supercharges bash and adds more interactivity. It also gives me interesting feedbacks like the branch and working directory I am currently in.

By the way, if you like the theme I'm using, feel free to steal my dotfiles. Also, I won't be covering the Git part as I already did in this blog post.

Cheatsheet

How many ".js" files does this folder contains?

find . -name "*.js" | wc -l

# You can also exclude a folder (i.e. node_modules)
find . -name "*.js" -not -path " **/node_modules/**" | wc -l

How many lines of code in this folder?

find . -name '*.vue' | xargs wc -l

# You can also exclude a folder (i.e. node_modules)
find . -name '*.vue' -not -path " **/node_modules/**" | xargs wc -l

Find all occurrences

Example: list where "console.log" is used in the codebase.

grep -Ril "console.log" .

# You can also exclude folders (i.e. .cache and node_modules)
grep -Ril "console.log" . --exclude-dir={\*cache,node_modules\*}

How big is my folder?

Example: list where "console.log" is used in the codebase.

du -sh .

# same but excluding git folder
du -sh -I .git .

What about Vim?

I mostly use Vim for Git commits. It can also be handy when your IDE struggle to open 10 0000 lines long files. To pimp my vim™, I installed something called SpaceVim. It adds fancy things like a file explorer and the syntax color.

Aliases

RAM consumption

alias ram='ps aux | awk '"'"'{print $6/1024 " MB\t\t" $11}'"'"' | sort -rn | head -25'

# Usage
$ ram
507.039 MB /usr/local/bin/node
461.391 MB /Applications/Brave
358.879 MB /Applications/Visual
...

🏴‍☠️ Change your mac address

This one is not really tech-related. I mostly use this one in airports/coffee shops to renew mac address (and get illimited access).

function airport() {
  local mac=$(openssl rand -hex 6 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//')
  sudo ifconfig en0 ether $mac
  sudo ifconfig en0 down
  sudo ifconfig en0 up
  echo "Your new physical address is $mac"
}

🙃 The Russian Roulette

alias russian-roulette='
  [$(( $RANDOM % 6 )) == 0] && rm -rf / || echo "You live"'

If you like to live on the edge... but please, be smart! And don't run commands you don't know the effects of!

Bonus #1: Tree

I use tree to display directories as trees. It very cool to write documentation.

$ tree content/pages

├── components
│ ├── button.js
│ └── checkbox.jpg
├── pages
│ ├── about.js
│ └── dashboard.js
├── index.js
└── README.md

Bonus #2: Gtop

Gtop is a system monitoring dashboard. Typing Gtop on my keyboard is usually quicker than opening the activity monitor (for some unknown reasons I always struggle to find it).

And you, what's your favourite bash tip?

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I hope you found it useful! If you liked it, please give it a ❤️ or a 🦄! Also, feel free to comment or ask questions in the section below or on Twitter @_maxpou :)

Originally published on maxpou.fr.

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