Command Line Archives

DevOps & System Admin.

Five of My Favorite Command-Line Utilities

My work often occurs on a remote machine I don't have access to, and it generally must be headless (no GUI). Here's my arsenal of essential CLI utilities.

Developer Tools

Simple Way to Start (and Stop!) Background Processes in Bash

A Bash script to quickly start and stop multiple processes from the command line during development, while running multiple servers and/or clients.

Developer Tools

Working with Text at the Command Line – Tools for Searching & Editing

The multi-monitor, high-resolution graphics revolution didn't bring graphics, just windows full of text. Command lines are still great working with text.

Developer Tools

A Tiny Toolbox for Spelunking through JSON

A quick look at how curl, bash, jq, and json-diff can make JSON less painful to wrangle from the command-line.

Extracurricular Activities

Tracking Down Disk Usage on the Command Line

I created short terminal command that I use to check disk usage by identifying large files and folders.

Developer Tools

An Introduction to Scripting Tmux Key Bindings

Scripting Tmux is a very powerful addition to your command line toolset. Here's how to add a Tmux key binding to open the file name under the cursor.

Developer Tools

Handling JSON from the Command Line with Jq

Jq allows you to avoid separate, multiline scripts in most cases and carry out JSON operations directly from the command line.

Functional Programming

Using Haskell’s CmdArgs Package

The CmdArgs package takes the pain out of creating command line interfaces around Haskell applications.

Developer Tools

Using Thor to Build a Command Line Interface

Here's a simple command line interface (created in Thor) that provides grep-like functionality around Ruby's regular expression functionality.