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macOS command-line tools you might not know about

(saurabhs.org)
2039 points Gadiguibou | 1 comments | 27 Jun 23 12:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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klausa ◴[27 Jun 23 12:42 UTC] No.36491947[source]▶
`pbcopy` and `pbpaste` are one of my most-loved in the list.

Dealing with some minified json, switching to iTerm, doing `pbpaste | json_pp | pbcopy` and having a clean output is _so_ nice.

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omginternets ◴[27 Jun 23 13:16 UTC] No.36492265[source]▶
If I had a nickel for each `cat foo.json | jq | pbcopy`, I'd be a rich man :)
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maleldil ◴[27 Jun 23 13:58 UTC] No.36492862[source]▶
That's a useless use of cat. You can use `jq . foo.json | pbcopy` or `jq < foo.json | pbcopy`.
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jdbartee ◴[27 Jun 23 14:05 UTC] No.36492960[source]▶
Speaking for myself, the first form is more natural- even if it’s a useless cat, because I’m always cat-ing files to see their structure. Then progressively tacking on different transforms. And then finally putting it in whatever I want as output.

It’s so ingrained, I’m more likely than not to just write it out that way even when I know exactly what I’m doing from the onset.

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1. fastaguy88 ◴[27 Jun 23 20:03 UTC] No.36497947{3}[source]▶
As a scientist who cares about reproducibility, the big difference between the "useless cat" and providing the input file name on the command line is that, in the latter case, the program can capture that file name and reproduce it. That is harder when using stdin.

Many of my programs and scripts start output with the line: # cmd arg1 arg2 arg3 ...

and simply echo back lines that start with '#'. That way, I have an internal record of the program that was run and the data file that was read (as well as previous parts of the analysis chain).

And, 'R' ignores lines starting with '#', so the record is there, but does not affect later analyses.