If you have ever ran which <command> and see duplicate entries it’s likely that you have duplicate entries in your $PATH. You can clean this up with a one liner at the end of your bashrc or zshrc.
Posts tagged: cli
All posts with the tag "cli"
54 posts
latest post 2026-03-04
Publishing rhythm
There is GNU coreutils command called mktemp that is super handy in shell scripts to make temporary landing spots for files so that they never clash with another instance, and will automatically get cleaned up when you restart, or whenever /tmp gets wiped. I’m not sure when that is, but I don’t expect it to be long.
Here are some examples of making temp directories in different places, my favorite is mktemp -dt mytemp-XXXXXX.
# makes a temporary directory in /tmp/ with the defaul template tmp.XXXXXXXXXX mktemp # makes a temporary directory in your current directory mktemp --directory mytemp-XXXXXX # shorter version mktemp -d mytemp-XXXXXX # same thing, but makes a file mktemp mytemp-XXXXXX # makes a temporary directory in your /tmp/ directory (or what ever you have configured as your TMPDIR) mktemp --directory --tmpdir mytemp-XXXXXX # shorter version mktemp -dt mytemp-XXXXXX # same thing, but makes a file mktemp --tmpdir mytemp-XXXXXX # shorter version mktemp -t mytemp-XXXXXX
Use Case #
Here is a sample script that shows how to capture the tempdir as...
...
Once you give a branch the big D (git branch -D mybranch) its gone, its lost from your history. It’s completely removed from your log. There will be no reference to these commits, or will there?
Checkout is your savior, all you need is the commit hash.
your terminal is still open
We have all done this, you give branch the big D only to realize it was the wrong one. Don’t worry, not all is lost, this is the easiest to recover from. When you run the delete command you will see something like this.
...
As I am toying around with textual, I am wanting some popup user input to take over. Textual is still pretty new and likely to change quite significantly, so I don’t want to overdo the work I put into it, So for now on my personal tuis I am going to shell out to tmux.
The main issue is that when you are in a textual app, it kinda owns the input. So if you try to run another python function that calls for input it just cant get there. There is a textual-inputs library that covers this, and it might work really well for some use cases, but many of my use cases have been for things that are pre-built like copier, and I am trying to throw something together quick.
textual is still very beta
Part of this comes down to the fact that textual is still very beta and likely to change a lot, so all of the work I have done with it is for quick and dirty, or fun side projects.
...
Git has a built in way to rebase all the way back to the beginning of time. There is no need to scroll through the log to find the first hash, or find the total number of commits. Just use --root.
Git reflog can perform some serious magic in reviving your hard work from the dead if you happen to loose it.
You must git commit! If you never commit the file, git cannot help you. You might look into your trashcan, filesystem versions, onedrive, box, dropbox. If you have none of this, then you are probably hosed.
I really like to practice these techniques before I need to use them so that I understand how they work in a low stakes fashion. This helps me understand what I can and cannot do, and how to do it in a place that does not matter in any way at all.
This is what I did to revive a dropped docker-compose.yml file. The idea is that if I can find the commit hash, I can cherry-pick it.
...
Right inside the git docs, is states that the git reflog command runs git reflog show by default which is an alias for git log -g --abbrev-commit --pretty=oneline
This epiphany deepens my understanding of git, and lets me understand that most git log flags might also work with git log -g.
Here are some git commands for you to try out on your own that are all pretty similar, but vary in how much information they show.
# These show only first line of the commit message subject, the hash, and index git reflog git log -g --abbrev-commit --pretty=oneline # similar to git log, this is a fully featured log with author, date, and full # commit...
...
Reading eventbridge rules from the command line can be a total drag, pipe it into visidata to make it a breeze.
I just love when I start thinking through how to parse a bunch of json at the command line, maybe building out my own custom cli, then the solution is as simple as piping it into visidata. Which is a fantastic tui application that had a ton of vim-like keybindings and data features.
Anyone just starting out their vim customization journey is bound to run into this error.
E5520: <Cmd> mapping must end with <CR>
I did not get it #
I’ll admit, in hindsight it’s very clear what this is trying to tell me, but for whatever reason I still did not understand it and I just used a : everywhere.
If you run :h <cmd> you will see a lot of reasons why you should do it, from performance, to hygene, to ergonomics. You will also see another clear statement about how to use <cmd>.
E5520 <Cmd> commands must terminate, that is, they must be followed by <CR> in the {rhs} of the mapping definition. Command-line mode is never entered.
When to map with a : #
You still need to map your remaps with a : if you do not close it with a <cr>. This might be something like prefilling a command with a search term.
...
The default keybinding for copy-mode <prefix>-[ is one that is just so awkward for me to hit that I end up not using it at all. I was on a call with my buddy Nic this week and saw him just fluidly jump into copy-mode in an effortless fashion, so I had to ask him for his keybinding and it just made sense. Enter, that’s it. So I have addedt his to my ~/.tmux.conf along with one for alt-enter and have found myself using it way more so far.
To do this I just popped open my ~/.tmux.conf and added the following. Now I can get to copy-mode with <prefix>-Enter which is control-b Enter, or alt-enter.
bind Enter copy-mode bind -n M-Enter copy-mode
More on copy-mode #
I have a full video on copy-mode you can find here.
A super useful tool when doing PR’s or checking your own work during a big refactor is the silver searcher. Its a super fast command line based searching tool. You just run ag "<search term>" to search for your search term. This will list out every line of every file in any directory under your current working directory that contains a match.
It’s often useful to need some extra context around the change. I recently reviewed a bunch of PR’s that moved schema from save_args to the root of the dataset in all yaml configs. To ensure they all made it to the top level DataSet configuraion, and not underneath save_args. I can do a search for all the schemas, and ensure that none of them are under save_args anymore.
stow -R --simulate -vvv git
Today I discovered a sweet new cli for compressing images. squoosh cli is a wasm powered cli that supports a bunch of formats that I would want to convert my website images to.
First the main feature of squoosh is a web app that makes your images smaller right in the browser, using the same wasm. It’s sweet! There is a really cool swiper to compare the output image with the original, and graphical dials to change your settings.
What is even cooler is that once you have settings you are happy with and are really cutting down those kb’s on your images, there is a copy cli command button! If you have npx (which you should if you have nodejs and npm) already installed it just works without installing anything more.
...
With the latest version of minecraft it requires a very new, possibly the latest, version of java. Lately we have been getting into modded minecraft and I maintain the server for us. It’s been tricky to say the least. One hurdle I recently hit involves having the wrong version of java.
I was getting this error trying to get a 1.12.2 forge server running.
Caused by: java.lang.ClassCastException: class jdk.internal.loader.ClassLoaders$AppClassLoader cannot be cast to class java.net.URLClassLoader (jdk.internal.loader.ClassLoaders$AppClassLoader and java.net.URLClassLoader are in module java.base of loader ‘bootstrap’)
In researching our errors, I found this on a forum.
...
I often pop into my blog from neovim with the intent to look at just a single series of posts, til, gratitude, or just see todays posts. Markata has a great way of mapping over posts and returning their path that is designe exactly for this use case.
To tie these into a Telescope picker you add the command as the find_command, and comma separate the words of the command, with no spaces. I did also --sort,date,--reverse in there so that the newest posts are closest to the cursor.
nnoremap geit <cmd>Telescope find_files find_command=markata,list,--map,path,--filter,date==today<cr> nnoremap geil...
...
Copier allows you to run post render tasks, just like cookiecutter. These are defined as a list of tasks in your copier.yml. They are simply shell commands to run.
The example I have below runs an update-gratitude bash script after the copier template has been rendered.
# copier.yml num: 128 _answers_file: .gratitude-copier-answers.yml _tasks: - "update-gratitude"
I have put the script in ~/.local/bin so that I know it’s always on my $PATH. It will reach back into the copier.yml and update the default number.
I really appreciate that in linux anything can be scripted, including setting the wallpaper. So everytime I disconnect a monitor I can just rerun my script and fix my wallpaper without digging deep into the ui and fussing through a bunch of settings.
feh --bg-scale ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper/my_wallpaper.png
I set my default wallpaper with
fehusing the command above.Leaning in on feh, we can use fzf to pick a wallpaper from a directory full of wallpapers with very few keystrokes.
alias wallpaper='ls ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper | fzf --preview="feh --bg-scale ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper/{}" | xargs -I {} feh --bg-scale ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper/{}'I have mine alias’d to
wallpaperso that I can quickly run it from my terminal.
Converting markdown posts to pdf on ubuntu takes a few packages from the standard repos. I had to go through a few stack overflow posts, and nothing seemed to have all the fonts and packages that I needed to convert markdown, but this is what ended up working for me.
sudo apt install \ pandoc \ texlive-latex-base \ texlive-fonts-recommended \ texlive-extra-utils \ texlive-latex-extra \ texlive-xetex
Using pandoc to convert markdown to a pdf #
# older versions of pandoc, I needed this one on ubuntu 18.04 pandoc pages/til/convert-markdown-pdf-linux.md -o convert-markdown-pdf.pdf --latex-engine=xelatex # newer versions of pandoc, I needed this one on ubuntu 21.04 pandoc pages/til/convert-markdown-pdf-linux.md -o convert-markdown-pdf.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex 
I recently paired up with another dev running windows with Ubuntu running in wsl, and we had a bit of a stuggle to get our project off the ground because they were missing com system dependencies to get going.
Open up a terminal and get your required system dependencies using the apt package manager and the standard ubuntu repos.
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install \ python3-dev \ python3-pip \ python3-venv \ python3-virtualenv pip install pipx
Using an Ansible-Playbook #
I like running things like this through an ansible-playbook as it give me some extra control and repeatability next time I have a new machine to setup.
- hosts: localhost gather_facts: true become: true become_user: "{{ lookup('env', 'USER') }}" pre_tasks: - name: update repositories apt: update_cache=yes become_user: root changed_when: False vars: user: "{{ ansible_user_id }}" tasks: - name: Install System Packages 1 (terminal) become_user: root apt: name: - build-essential - python3-dev - python3-pip - python3-venv - python3-virtualenv -...
Stow is an incredible way to manage your dotfiles. It works by managing symlinks between your dotfiles directory and the rest of the system. You can then make your dotfiles directory a git repo and have it version controlled. In my honest opinion, when I was trying to get started the docs straight into deep detail of things I frankly don’t really care about and jumped right over how to use it.
When using stow its easiest to keep your dotfiles directory (you may name it what you want) in your home directory, with application directories inside of it.
Then each application directory should reflet the same diretory structure as you want in your home directory.
Here is a simple example with my zshrc.
...