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Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

(evanhahn.com)
756 points speckx | 2 comments | 22 Oct 25 14:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.456s | source
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oceanplexian ◴[22 Oct 25 18:11 UTC] No.45672984[source]▶
It's weird how the circle of life progresses for a developer or whatever.

- When I was a fresh engineer I used a pretty vanilla shell environment

- When I got a year or two of experience, I wrote tons of scripts and bash aliases and had a 1k+ line .bashrc the same as OP

- Now, as a more tenured engineer (15 years of experience), I basically just want a vanilla shell with zero distractions, aliases or scripts and use native UNIX implementations. If it's more complicated than that, I'll code it in Python or Go.

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1. russellbeattie ◴[22 Oct 25 22:22 UTC] No.45675916[source]▶
The moment of true enlightenment is when you finally decide to once and for all memorize all the arguments and their order for those command line utilities that you use at an interval that's just at the edge of your memory: xargs, find, curl, rsync, etc.

That, plus knowing how to parse a man file to actually understand how to use a command (a skill that takes years to master) pretty much removes the need for most aliases and scripts.

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2. whatevertrevor ◴[22 Oct 25 23:18 UTC] No.45676372[source]▶
I already have limited space for long term memory, bash commands are very far down the list of things I'd want to append to my long term storage.

I use ctrl-R with a fuzzy matching program, and let my terminal remember it for me.

And before it's asked: yes that means I'd have more trouble working in a different/someone else's environment. But as it barely ever happens for me, it's hardly an important enough scenario to optimize for.