Posts tagged bash

Bash Productivity Enhancers

Jan 20th

Posted by Paul Kehrer in Posts

2 comments

Bash is an extremely powerful shell, but its shortcuts are not readily apparent. Here are a few shortcuts and tips that I’ve noticed many (already proficient) bash users are not aware of. You can also check out Improved Bash History and More Useful Bash/Terminal Settings for more ideas for improving your bash productivity.

Bash Navigation Shortcuts

When editing a long command, there are quite a few navigation and editing shortcuts. By default bash typically operates in emacs mode.

  • Ctrl-A to go to the beginning of the line
  • Ctrl-E to go to the end of a line.
  • Ctrl-W will cut the current word (searching backward)
  • Ctrl-U will cut More >

Fixing GrowlMail for Mail 4.2

Nov 9th

Posted by Paul Kehrer in Posts

52 comments

Lately Apple has been revving the version number (and plugin compatibility UUID) of Mail.app with every version of 10.6. This breaks bundles like GrowlMail even when they are still compatible. The easy fix (although not necessarily the best if it turns out an update is required!) is to run a few commands in Terminal to add the new UUIDs1 to the SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUID key in the Info.plist.2

If you have already had your plugins disabled by opening Mail.app you’ll need to look in ~/Library/Mail (or /Library/Mail if you installed globally) and move the files back to the active bundles directory. They’ll typically be More >

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Find A Matching Certificate And Key Pair

Nov 8th

Posted by Paul Kehrer in Posts

No comments

If you have a list of keys and SSL certs and don’t know which cert belongs with which key, here’s a script for you. It’s not efficient (nested for loop!), but it gets the job done quickly.1

#!/bin/bash
for i in `ls *.key` 
do
key_mod=`openssl rsa -noout -in $i -modulus`
for j in `ls *.cer`
do
x509_mod=`openssl x509 -noout -in $j -modulus`
if [ "$x509_mod" == "$key_mod" ]; then
echo "$j matches $i"
fi 
done
done
  1. If bash allowed multidimensional or associative arrays this would be trivial to optimize. ↩
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More Useful Bash/Terminal Settings

Nov 2nd

Posted by Paul Kehrer in Posts

1 comment

A few more tricks to make your bash environment better. As always, add them to your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile to enable.

Disable the pagination of long lists when ambiguously tab completing.

bind 'set page-completions off'

Increase max returned items before being prompted. (ie, “Display all 380 possibilities? (y or n”). You can set the number to whatever you’d like.

bind 'set completion-query-items 300'

Show the list of autocompletion options after the first tab. This prevents the beep + second tab behavior.

bind 'set show-all-if-ambiguous on'

When autocompleting for cd or rmdir, list only directories as choices.

complete -d cd rmdir

Autocompletion for ssh known_hosts. Add this to your ~/.ssh/config (if the file doesn’t exist, create More >

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Improved Bash History

Oct 30th

Posted by Paul Kehrer in Posts

3 comments

If you use multiple shells simultaneously (in my case with Terminal.app on OS X) you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the history of the last closed shell clobbers any commands you might have executed in others. This makes it difficult to use reverse-i-search to find commands you recall using. However, with a few modifications to your bash history you can greatly increase its utility.

export HISTCONTROL=erasedups
export HISTSIZE=10000
export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%D %T "
export HISTIGNORE="&:ls:exit"
shopt -s histappend

Save the above lines to your home directory’s .profile (or .bash_profile) and your shell history will now prevent duplicates, have a maximum of 10,000 items, append a timestamp to all new commands, exclude a list of More >

RAM Disks in OS X

Apr 21st

Posted by Paul Kehrer in Posts

No comments

If you’ve ever wanted to set up a ramdisk in Mac OS X, here’s a quick script you can use. Simply invoke it with a size in MB and the name for your volume and it will create and automount it for you. It also won’t leave any dangling directories in your /Volumes/ when you eject it! Be sure to chmod the file you place the script in to make it executable (755 or likewise).

#!/bin/bash
if [ -n "$3" ]; then NUM_ARG=ERR; fi
if [ -z "$1" ]; then NUM_ARG=ERR; fi
 
if [ -n "$NUM_ARG" ];
then
echo 'Usage: ./ramdisk <size in MB> <name, optional>'
exit
fi
SIZE=$1
NAME='my_ramdisk'
let "SIZE *= 2048"
if [ -n "$2" ]; then NAME=$2; fi
diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "$NAME" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://${SIZE}`
echo 'Done'
More >
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