Bash for developers

Like many developers, I use the terminal on a daily basis.

How my terminal looks like

I actually use 2 different terminals: the one embedded in VScode and iTerm2 (I’m on macOS). Although this post contains the word bash, I don’t use it directly. I use zsh with ohmyzsh. If you never heard about it before, it supercharges bash and adds more interactivity. It also gives me interesting feedbacks like the branch and working directory I am currently in.

By the way, if you like the theme I’m using, feel free to steal my dotfiles. Also, I won’t be covering the Git part as I already did in this blog post.

Cheatsheet

How many “.js” files does this folder contains?

find . -name "*.js" | wc -l

# You can also exclude a folder (i.e. node_modules)
find . -name "*.js" -not -path "**/node_modules/**" | wc -l

How many lines of code in this folder?

find . -name '*.vue' | xargs wc -l

# You can also exclude a folder (i.e. node_modules)
find . -name '*.vue' -not -path "**/node_modules/**" | xargs wc -l

Find all occurrences

Example: list where “console.log” is used in the codebase.

grep -Ril "console.log" .

# You can also exclude folders (i.e. .cache and node_modules)
grep -Ril "console.log" . --exclude-dir={\*cache,node_modules\*}

How big is my folder?

Example: list where “console.log” is used in the codebase.

du -sh .

# same but excluding git folder
du -sh -I .git .

What about Vim?

SpaceVim a game changer for vim

I mostly use Vim for Git commits. It can also be handy when your IDE struggle to open 10 0000 lines long files. To pimp my vim™, I installed something called SpaceVim. It adds fancy things like a file explorer and the syntax color.

Aliases

Everything verbose!

Since you’re there, I aliased all my filesystem commands to make them more verbose.

# mv, rm, cp
alias mv='mv -v'
alias rm='rm -v'
alias cp='cp -v'

RAM consumption

alias ram='ps aux | awk '"'"'{print $6/1024 " MB\t\t" $11}'"'"' | sort -rn | head -25'


# Usage
$ ram
507.039 MB              /usr/local/bin/node
461.391 MB              /Applications/Brave
358.879 MB              /Applications/Visual
...

🏴‍☠️ Change your mac address

This one is not really tech-related. I mostly use this one in airports/coffee shops to renew mac address (and get illimited access).

function airport() {
  local mac=$(openssl rand -hex 6 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//')
  sudo ifconfig en0 ether $mac
  sudo ifconfig en0 down
  sudo ifconfig en0 up
  echo "Your new physical address is $mac"
}

🙃 The Russian Roulette

alias russian-roulette='
  [ $(( $RANDOM % 6 )) == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "You live"'

If you like to live on the edge… but please, be smart! And don’t run commands you don’t know the effects of!

Bonus #1: Tree

I use tree to display directories as trees. It very cool to write documentation.

$ tree content/pages

├── components
│   ├── button.js
│   └── checkbox.jpg
├── pages
│   ├── about.js
│   └── dashboard.js
├── index.js
└── README.md

Bonus #2: Gtop

Gtop is a system monitoring dashboard. Typing Gtop on my keyboard is usually quicker than opening the activity monitor (for some unknown reasons I always struggle to find it).

how gtop looks like

Bonus #3: cloc

If you have npm and npx installed you can use cloc like this:

$  npx cloc src content gatsby-*

------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files        blank      comment       code
------------------------------------------------------------
Markdown             64         2695            0       8558
JavaScript           77          475           78       3761
SVG                   3           13            1       1841
------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                144         3183           79      14160
------------------------------------------------------------

# You can also check a subset of files like this
$ npx cloc src --match-f='.test.js'

About the author

Hey, I'm Maxence Poutord, a passionate software engineer. In my day-to-day job, I'm working as a senior front-end engineer at Orderfox. When I'm not working, you can find me travelling the world or cooking.

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