Little bash programming

[Kevin Brown]

hmm, command-line quickies?

"cd -" : takes you to the last directory you were in.  Good way to bounce
between two directories in far areas of the filesystem.
"cd ~" or "cd" : takes you to your home directory.
"rpm -qa | grep <text>" : find a package if it was installed.
"tail -f <file>" : watch a file as it changes.  Can't think of a way to do this
in Windows and notepad can't deal with large text logs.  Would hate to think
what would happen opening the logs in Word.

can't think of any other quicky command-line tricks, but most commonly used unix
commands for me are (in no particular order): cd, ls, grep, rpm, sed, awk, vi,
man, and tail.

Anyone want to expand on this?

> How about chipping in on a presentation then?
> We'll put someone more foolhardy in front of
> the slings and arrows :) (I'll do it if noone
> else is interested)
> 
> Maybe list your 10 favorite CLI quickies?
> (everyone is more than welcome to contribute!)
> 
> Business for Engineers - it's the same damned
> thing at U Cincinnati. ugh. The instructor had
> the worst toupee I've ever seen - it was jet
> black, but his hair was gray.
> 
> On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Kevin Brown wrote:
> 
> > EEEAAAKKKK!!!!, Public speaking.
> >
> > Something that still gives me nightmares.  Was one of the reasons I did so poor
> > in the "Business for Engineers" classes at ASU where all they did was teach
> > Excel and giving presentations.
> >
> > > Nice! To me, bash and the GNU tools are at
> > > least 50% of why I can't be as productive
> > > on MS. This is the sort of thing that makes
> > > advanced Windows users go, "oooh, that's
> > > pretty cool."
> > >
> > > Wanna do a presentation or demo of CLI-power
> > > at Install Fest?
> > >
> > > my favorite quickie for new users:
> > >
> > > $ apropos file
> > >     (too many results)
> > > $ apropos file | grep -i compress
> > >     (ahh, that's better)
> > >
> > > Let's see you try that on Windows :)
> > >
> > > On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Kevin Brown wrote:
> > >
> > > > Came home tonite and got onto my Workstation and noticed that my IceWM session
> > > > from the server was gone.  Sometimes it disappears because the two boxes lose
> > > > contact with each other.  So I logged into the box and exported the DISPLAY
> > > > varaiable and restarted IceWM.  Then it occured to me that I could make this
> > > > much easier for myself.
> > > >
> > > > Played around with ps, grep, and awk and got something that would find the users
> > > > who have icewm running.  X is never run directly on the box because the only
> > > > time I sit at it is if it goes down.  So, I decided to muck with my
> > > > .bash_profile and see if I could auto fire off icewm from me just logging in.
> > > > Short story made shorter, yep.  Only a little basic thing, but since I rarely do
> > > > any coding (shell or otherwise) I think it was pretty good.  Great thing is, it
> > > > will only fire up icewm if I don't already have a copy up.
> > > >
> > > > username=`ps -ef | grep <username>.*[0-9].icewm | awk '{print $1}'`
> > > >
> > > > if [ ! Xhellgate = X$username ]
> > > > then
> > > >         echo "IceWM not running on your display"
> > > >         export DISPLAY=<my ip>:0.0
> > > >         icewm &
> > > > fi
> > > >
> > > > Guess I can later try and add some more sanity checking, but this works for now
> > > > :)