AstonJ

AstonJ

Which command line tools do you use?

I’ve been watching Prag Dave’s Elixir course and I noticed he uses tree:

Tree is a recursive directory listing program that produces a depth indented listing of files. Color is supported ala dircolors if the LS_COLORS environment variable is set, output is to a tty, and the -C flag is used. With no arguments, tree lists the files in the current directory. When directory arguments are given, tree lists all the files and/or directories found in the given directories each in turn. Upon completion of listing all files/directories found, tree returns the total number of files and/or directories listed.

On Mac install with: brew install tree

EG:

$tree
.
├── README.md
├── lib
│   └── hangman.ex
├── mix.exs
└── mix.lock

You can use the options to ignore directories or files.

Any other cool command line tools you know of or use?

Most Liked

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

In short, a heck ton of them. I can write a series of articles about which tools I use. I made it a credo to gather as much as possible CLI and TUI tools and become master at them. The latter part still eludes me – not enough time and energy still – but I have become quite the small encyclopaedia of CLI/TUI tools.

Waiting for Aston’s “you should write a blog about it Dimi!”. :003:

Hallski

Hallski

Another one for tree, rg and jq.

Some others:

Maartz

Maartz

I like a tool called tl;dr.
It gives you basic knowledge of many commands.
On macOS it’s a good’ol brew install tldr
They also have a nodejs client, so it can be installed with npm.

EG:

❯ tldr grep

grep

Find patterns in files using regular expressions.
More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.html>.

- Search for a pattern within a file:
    grep "search_pattern" path/to/file

- Search for an exact string (disables regular expressions):
    grep --fixed-strings "exact_string" path/to/file

- Search for a pattern in all files recursively in a directory, showing line numbers of matches, ignoring binary files:
    grep --recursive --line-number --binary-files=without-match "search_pattern" path/to/directory

- Use extended regular expressions (supports `?`, `+`, `{}`, `()` and `|`), in case-insensitive mode:
    grep --extended-regexp --ignore-case "search_pattern" path/to/file

- Print 3 lines of context around, before, or after each match:
    grep --context|before-context|after-context=3 "search_pattern" path/to/file

- Print file name and line number for each match:
    grep --with-filename --line-number "search_pattern" path/to/file

- Search for lines matching a pattern, printing only the matched text:
    grep --only-matching "search_pattern" path/to/file

- Search stdin for lines that do not match a pattern:
    cat path/to/file | grep --invert-match "search_pattern"

If a command does not exist, you can add it with a PR on their repo.
It’s a community-based FOSS tool.

Saves me a ton of time in googling and reading man pages.

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

AstonJ
Which screen resolutions do you frequently use? Note: not the resolution the display is capable of mind, but the resolution you’re using...
New
justinjunodev
Figured this would be a cool topic and maybe provide some inspiration for those who are just starting to work from home. Feel free to sha...
New
AstonJ
What chair do you have while working… and why? Is there a ‘best’ type of chair or working position for developers?
New
AstonJ
If so, what was the last blog post you wrote… and if not, why not?
New
Exadra37
Cloudflare as workers to run serverless code without using containers: So it seems that Isolates is based on: What we ended up settl...
New
AstonJ
Want to plug where you work? Here’s your chance! Perhaps you could also mention what kind of stuff you’re working on? :nerd_face:
New
finner
When you are under pressure to deliver you ideally want your Pull Request to be reviewed, approved and merged as quick as possible. So do...
New
AstonJ
Continuing the discussion from Thinking about learning Crystal, let’s discuss - I was wondering which languages don’t GC - maybe we can c...
New
TwistingTwists
Hello Fellow developers, I have been trying to wrap my head around How difficult would it have been to be a dev 20-30 years ago? I have...
New
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell. With Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate, you’ll go beyond the syntax—and...
New
New
AstonJ
We have a thread about the keyboards we have, but what about nice keyboards we come across that we want? If you have seen any that look n...
New
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
AstonJ
If you want a quick and easy way to block any website on your Mac using Little Snitch simply… File &gt; New Rule: And select Deny, O...
New
First poster: AstonJ
Jan | Rethink the Computer. Jan turns your computer into an AI machine by running LLMs locally on your computer. It’s a privacy-focus, l...
New
sir.laksmana_wenk
I’m able to do the “artistic” part of game-development; character designing/modeling, music, environment modeling, etc. However, I don’t...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
Background Lately I am in a quest to find a good quality TTS ai generation tool to run locally in order to create audio for some videos I...
New