¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

There is a distinct, visceral kind of pain in watching an otherwise brilliant engineer hold down the Backspace key for six continuous seconds to fix a typo at the beginning of a line.

I would be lying if I said I don’t cringe upon observing this action.

What an amazing collection of tips & tricks!

I use most of these ’tricks’ all the time, pretty much every week. They are compatible with bash and zsh.

There are two constructs I don’t use much that would be useful for me to learn:

The Everything-Logger

command |& tee file.log: Standard pipes (|) only catch standard output (stdout). If a script throws an error (stderr), it skips the pipe and bleeds directly onto your screen, missing the log file. |& pipes both stdout and stderr (it’s a helpful shorthand for 2>&1 |).

and

Backgrounding and Disowning

You started a massive, hour-long database import task, but you forgot to run it in tmux or screen. It’s tying up your terminal, and if your SSH connection drops, the process dies. Panic sets in.

[…]

CTRL + Z, then bg, then disown

The author ends with:

The shell is a toolbox, not an obstacle course. You don’t need to memorize all of these today. Pick just one trick, force it into your daily habits for a week, and then pick another. Stop letting the terminal push you around, and start rearranging the furniture. It’s your house now.

…which I vehemently agree with.