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What are some of your most useful or favorite terminal commands? (piefed.social)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I've been setting up a new Proxmox server and messing around with VMs, and wanted to know what kind of useful commands I'm missing out on. Bonus points for a little explainer.

Journalctl | grep -C 10 'foo' was useful for me when I needed to troubleshoot some fstab mount fuckery on boot. It pipes Journalctl (boot logs) into grep to find 'foo', and prints 10 lines before and after each instance of 'foo'.

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[–] 29 points 10 months ago* (12 children)

I use $_ a lot, it allows you to use the last parameter of the previous command in your current command

mkdir something && cd $_

nano file
chmod +x $_

As a simple example.

If you want to create nested folders, you can do it in one go by adding -p to mkdir

mkdir -p bunch/of/nested/folders

Good explanation here:
https://koenwoortman.com/bash-mkdir-multiple-subdirectories/q

Sometimes starting a service takes a while and you're sitting there waiting for the terminal to be available again. Just add --no-block to systemctl and it will do it on the background without keeping the terminal occupied.

systemctl start --no-block myservice

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    For interactive editing, the keybind alt+. inserts the last argument from the previous command. Using this instead of $_ has the potential to make your shell history a little more explicit. (vim $_ isn't as likely to work a few commands later, but vim actual_file.sh might)

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I just press M-.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I really hope I remember this one long enough to make it a habit

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (2 children)

    Is there a version of $_ that works with mv? It just keeps renaming my files to "filedir," I'm trying sort through a directory and move some files to another for keeping, be easier if I could do:

    mv picture1.jpg /path/to/keepdirectory

    then do something like

    mv picture2.jpg $_

    And so on. But with that I'd just be renaming all my photos "filedir" instead of moving them lol.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I just tried your use case, and it did move the files to the correct folder.

    using zsh:

     user@computer  ~  touch test.jpg
 user@computer  ~  touch test2.jpg
 user@computer  ~  mv test.jpg ./Public 
 user@computer  ~  mv test2.jpg $_
 user@computer  ~  ls ./Public 
test2.jpg  test.jpg
 user@computer  ~ 

    using bash:

    [user@computer Public]$ mkdir test
[user@computer Public]$ ls
test  test2.jpg  test.jpg
[user@computer Public]$ mv test.jpg ./test
[user@computer Public]$ mv test2.jpg $_
[user@computer Public]$ ls
test
[user@computer Public]$ ls test/
test2.jpg  test.jpg
[user@computer Public]$

    using bash and full path:

    [user@computer Public]$ ls
test  test2.jpg  test.jpg
[user@computer Public]$ mv test.jpg /home/user/Public/test
[user@computer Public]$ mv test2.jpg $_
[user@computer Public]$ ls
test
[user@computer Public]$ ls test/
test2.jpg  test.jpg
[user@computer Public]$

    What shell are you using? You can check it by using echo $0.

     user@computer  ~  echo $0
/usr/bin/zsh

    [user@computer ~]$ echo $0
/bin/bash

    I can't reproduce it, even when putting the directory path in quotes, it still simply moved the file.

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