ls

Once upon a time, we talked a bit about man pages, and how useful they are for learning about a new program. We didn’t really get into how you find programs that you might want to run. This is what we’ll start exploring in the rest of this post. First, a few things to know. Most executable files, also called “binaries” are stored in a bin directory. This is just convention, since technically a binary file can live anywhere. [Read More]

So, you’re loving life, using ls(1) to list your files, and making directories with mkdir(1), impressing people by printing out their names using banner(1) , and jumping around the command line like a pro when someone asks you if you still have a copy of that photo you emailed them last year with all your old high school friends in it. Maybe? If you’re anything like me, your home directory is a bit of a mess, with folders and files everywhere. [Read More]

Once you get comfortable poking around with your shell, you start to wonder if there aren’t easier ways to do some common tasks. We’re constantly cd‘ing places, and running commands, and having to remember really long incantations just to list our files in reverse chronological order (ls -lrth). I’ve compiled the following list of useful shortcuts for using the command line. They have all been tested on bash(1) and ksh(1). bash (Bourne Again SHell) is the default shell on MacOS and many Linux distributions. [Read More]