In this post, I will be sharing my favorite commandline one liners that have made my workflow productive and more efficient. As a regular Linux user, I have been using commandline extensively to perform daily tasks such as creating files, navigating through directories , moving files and editing files using vim.

  1. ps aux | convert label:@- process.png

This commmand allows you to convert your shell output into an image as this makes it much easier than taking a screenshot of your shell if you want to share your output with someone.

Note:convert utility is part of imagemagick if you don't have convert you can install by installing imagemagick.

  1. curl ipinfo.io

If you want to know your external ip address using ipinfo.io you can simple run this command or you even add this command as your bash alias.

3.git log --format='%aN' | sort -u

This comes in very handy especially if you are working on an open source project and wants to know who has contributed to the project.

  1. history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head.

If you want to see which commands you run often you can run the following command and you can even add in your .bashrc as an alias.

  1. ls -d */

As someone who uses commandline everyday, this command is very useful when listing directories only and you can always set this command as a bash alias so you can access it quickily.

  1. du -hs */ | sort -hr | head

This command will allow you to view 10 largest directories in your current directory.

  1. ss -p

This command allows you to see what apps are consuming internet.

  1. grep . *

If you want to cat bunch of files at once you can run this command.

  1. rm -f !(test.txt).

This command will remove all the files from the directory but the not the one specified within brackets.

  1. python3 -m http.server

This command will allow you start an http server and serve your files. It comes in handy when you want share an html file over the network.

  1. mkfifo hello; script -f hello

This command will allow you to share your terminal session in real time. this was something I recently discovered and I was totally surprised by this command.

See it in Action

Lastly I hope you enjoyed reading this and got a chance to learn something new from this post and if you have any commandline tips or one liners feel free to comment below and I would love to check it out.

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