Working with Linux – Quick Hacks for the Command Line

By Petru Ișfan and Bogdan Vaida

About This Book

• Improve your terminal and command-line productivity by using powerful tools
• Sharpen your existing command-line skills and achieve complex tasks faster
• Save time and money by creating customized commands that automate day-to-day tasks

Who This Book Is For

This book is for system administrators and developers who know the basics of Linux and want to brush up and sharpen their skills. Prior experience with Linux shell is required.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Release date: May 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787122277

Book preview

Table of Contents

Working with Linux – Quick Hacks for the Command Line

Credits

About the Authors

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Why subscribe?

Customer Feedback

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Introduction

Are you ready?

Terminator – the ultimate terminal

Preferences menu

Features

Guake – not Quake!

ClipIt – copy-paste at its finest

2. Productive Shells – Reinvent the way you work

Oh-my-zsh – your terminal never felt this good before!

Basic regular expressions

Pipes and subshells – your shell's salt and pepper

Shell scripting for fun and profit

Shell scripting libraries

3. Vim kung fu

Supercharging Vim

Color scheme desert

Keyboard kung fu

Plugin steroids for Vim

Vim password manager

Instant configuration restoring

4. CLI – The Hidden Recipe

Sed – one-liner productivity treasure

You can run, but you can't hide… from find

tmux – virtual consoles, background jobs and the like

Network – Who's listening?

Autoenv – Set a lasting, project-based habitat

Don't rm the trash

5. Developers' Treasure

The spot webserver

Shrinking spells and other ImageMagick

Go with the Git flow

Merging Git conflicts with ease

From localhost to instant DNS

JSON jamming in the new age

No more mister nice guy

6. Terminal Art

Index

Working with Linux – Quick Hacks for the Command Line

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Working with Linux – Quick Hacks for the Command Line

Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: May 2017

Production reference: 1260517

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78712-918-4

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Credits

Author

Petru Ișfan

Bogdan Vaida

Commissioning Editor

Kartikey Pandey

Acquisition Editor

Prachi Bisht

Content Development Editor

Prachi Bisht

Trusha Shriyan

Technical Editor

Naveenkumar Jain

Copy Editors

Safis Editing

Project Coordinator

Kinjal Bari

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Aishwarya Gangawane

Graphics

Kirk D'Penha

Production Coordinator

Melwyn Dsa

Cover Work

Melwyn Dsa

About the Authors

Petru Ișfan is a full-stack developer, Linux evangelist, open source lover, and cloud pioneer. Petru has worked all his engineering life in Linux, and has tried all the major distributions out there. He specializes not only in software development, but in the whole software engineering stack, focusing on tools and workflows that enhance developer productivity and enjoyment.

An early adopter of technology, he uses passion and best practices to deliver software products, mainly for the Web and the mobile world, working with clients big and small. He is really enthusiastic about finding the most efficient and elegant solutions for all problems.

Bogdan Vaida burst onto the training scene in 2009 using extremely old Powerpoint presentations. Luckily, two years later, he switched to experiential training and learning by using methodologies that he practiced devotedly in all of his training. Known for his no-nonsense approach to getting results, Bogdan has been told that he helps participants get their own insanely practical insights.

What does he do? He travels around the world doing experiential training in fields ranging from video editing to personality typologies and trainer training. While doing this, he also manages his online courses, which have over 10,000 students from all over the world.

In 2015, he beat the record for total time spent in airports.

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Preface

Our mission is to save Linux users from their unproductive habits.

In this book, you will learn:

What's one of the best terminals to use (just a hint: you need that split screen functionality).

How clipboard managers memorize the things you copy, so you don't have to.

How to use the greatest/biggest/most intelligent :)) console editor since humankind appeared. Yes, it's Vim. And we'll dive deep into its usefulness.

Zsh and its awesome oh-my-zsh framework featuring over 200 plugins for developers and productivity seekers.

Extensive lessons on terminal commands: how to find and replace text, parts of text, tiny bits of text or even non-text.

How to use pipes and subshells to create customized commands that automate day-to-day tasks.

And much more. This book is for all the programmers that are new to the Linux environment.

But who are we?

Petru: the infamous coder with many years of Linux experience. He types like crazy, loves doughnuts and has Linux wired in his brain! After discovering Linux and switching through a different distribution every week, annoying his girlfriend with tons of geeky stuff, now he annoys everybody with geek talks and the latest news in the tech world.

He spends his time coding frontends, backends, databases, Linux servers, and clouds.

Bogdan: the deserter! He went through more than 20 Linux and Unix distributions including Plan 9, HP-UX and all of the BSDs. But after his girlfriend left him because he spent way too much time in front of the computer he… switched to Mac.

Now he spends his time teaching over ten thousand students in his 8 online courses.

And we are here to help you double your terminal productivity!

If you don't know how to use sed, if you're not that used to pipeing commands, if you use the default terminal and if you are still using BASH then this book is for you.

Read it now and double your terminal productivity!

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction, introduces the most basic tools needed to transform your user experience.

Chapter 2, Productive Shells – Reinvent the Way You Work, reinvents the way you work. Colors, editors, and custom configurations all tailored to your custom needs.

Chapter 3, Vim kung fu, explains the way of the terminal warrior. This includes configuration and advanced usage to cover the majority of needs.

Chapter 4, CLI – The Hidden Recipe, shows different ways of going from good to great and boosting the command-line capabilities to new frontiers.

Chapter 5, Developers' Treasure, explains how to maximize productivity with these simple hacks. It's the