Posts tagged: cli

Using pbpaste for command substitution keeps sensitive or long URLs out of your shell history. Instead of typing git clone https://github.com/user/repo-with-long-name.git, copy the URL to clipboard and run git clone "$(pbpaste)". This prevents the URL from appearing in ~/.bash_history or ~/.zsh_history.

To get pbpaste working on both Xorg and Wayland, add this to your shell config:

if [[ $(command -v wl-copy) ]]; then
    alias pbcopy='wl-copy'
    pbpaste() { wl-paste; }
elif [[ $(command -v xclip) ]]; then
    alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
    pbpaste() { xclip -selection clipboard -o; }
fi

The function approach (instead of alias) enables command substitution, while the quotes around $(pbpaste) handle spaces and special characters safely.

Now you can use it.

git clone "$(pbpaste)"

More importantly secrets can stay out of your history.

export GITHUB_TOKEN="$(pbpaste)"
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="$(pbpaste)"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="$(pbpaste)"
export DATABASE_URL="$(pbpaste)"

Today I discovered the Urllink function in bash from the ujust tool from ublue.it. Seems like a cool trick, but might not work everywhere.

########
### Special text formating
########
## Function to generate a clickable link, you can call this using
# url=$(Urllink "https://ublue.it" "Visit the ublue website")
# echo "${url}"
function Urllink (){
    URL=$1
    TEXT=$2

    # Generate a clickable hyperlink
    printf "\e]8;;%s\e\\%s\e]8;;\e\\" "$URL" "$TEXT${n}"
}
```j

I’ve had a couple of uploads to twitter fail recently and has been a pain. I tried some online converters for convenience, but none of them worked. I reached out to chatgpt and found succeess with this ffmpeg command.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
  -vf "scale=trunc(oh*a/2)*2:min(720\,trunc(ih*a/2)*2)" \
  -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -level:v 4.1 \
  -b:v 3500k -maxrate 3500k -bufsize 7000k \
  -pix_fmt yuv420p \
  -c:a aac -b:a 128k -ar 44100 \
  -movflags +faststart \
  output.mp4