More Bash Goodness

Automate Daily Development Tasks with Bash from Egghead.io

Written by Eva Dee on (about a 4 minute read).

Navigation, Moving, Copying

  • less [filename]

Open a file for interactive reading, allowing scrolling and search.

  • /searchTerm

To search inside less, press / followed by the search term.

  • open [filename] -a TextEdit

Open a file with the specified application.

  • echo 'hello' > file.txt

Creates and initializes a file.

  • mv lib/* src/

Move everything from the lib folder to the src folder.

  • cp -R src/* lib/

Copy everything from the lib folder to src folder.

Find

  • find images/ -iname "*.png"

Find all .png files in the directory (-i flag for case insensitive).

  • find . -type d

Find all the folders.

  • find dist/ -name "*.builts.js" -delete

Find them and destroy them.

Grep

  • grep --color -n "npm.config.get" lib/npm.js

Will do a numbered & colorized output.

Curl

  • curl -iL URL

The -i include flag will output the header. -L for following redirects.

  • curl -H "Authorization: Bearer 123" localhost...

Add an authorization bearer token.

  • curl -X POST "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"title": "Curling", "author":"Cameron"}'

-X to change from the default GET request to a POST request. -d flag for data.

  • curl -i -X PUT \

For a multiline request, you can add \ to the end, followed by the Enter key. Continue writing the request in the new line.

  • curl -iL https://google.com -o google.txt

Output the response into a text file.

Scripts 

echo "Initializing JS project at $(pwd)"
git init
npm init -y # create package.json with all the defaults
mkdir src
touch src/index.js
code . # open src/index.js

A bash script for scaffolding a simple JS project. For scripts, you need to chmod u+x to be able to execute them and then ./[filename] to run them (or move the script to /urs/local/bin/[scriptname] to execute it globally).

  • ENV

Will display all your global environment variables.

temp=$(mktemp -d)
git clone --branch $1 $pwd
echo "branch $1 cloned to $temp"

Clone from a local Git repository branch to a temporary folder.

  • echo $?

Echo the exit status of your last command.

if [[ -z $USER ]]; then
    echo "true"
else
    echo "false"
fi

A simple conditional script.

check_status() {
    local status = $(curl -ILs https://example.org | head -n 1 | cut -d ' ' -f 2)
    if [[ $status -lt 200 ]] || [[ $status -gt 299 ]]; then
        echo "$1 failed with a $status"
        return 1
    else
        echo "$1 succeeded with a $status"
    fi
}

Curl a URL and check if it responds with a 200 range status. The complicated bit is just cutting the status code from the curl response header.

Similar notes