During my day-to-day activities, I use the Bash shell a lot. My #1 policy is to optimize the most frequently used activities as much as possible, so Iâ€ve compiled these handy bash shortcuts and hints (tested in SecureCRT on Windows and Konsole on Linux). The article only touches on the default bash mode – emacs, not vi. If you havenâ€t specifically assigned your shell mode to vi (set –o vi), youâ€re almost certainly using the emacs mode. Learn these and your shell productivity will skyrocket, I guarantee it.

Update #1: In response to a few people saying this list is too short and “[he] could've added something to it, to atleast make it look longer†(quote from one of Stumbleupon reviewers), I want to clarify something. I deliberately did not include …

If you are a GUI-oriented person, you need not read this. But if you are like me, you make heavy use of the console. If you are managing many machines as well as your own Linux workstation, it’s VERY important to know where your console session is.

Too many times in the past I had wanted to bring down my workstation, and would type “shutdown” or “reboot” in the console window, only to find out to my horrors that the console was really a remote session to one of my web servers serving up hundreds of web sites.

Whoops!

Well, that prompted me into developing a solution where I can tell at a glance where I happened to be logged in. This way,  I wouldn’t be in danger of issuing dangerous commands on the wrong server. And if you are working for someone else, it also keeps you from being FIRED!

I use KDE to do my development and …

Yesterday I went to beCamp 2008 along with four roomfuls of other people interested in technology (perhaps close to 100 people total). The conference was a lot of fun. Not everything went as planned, but that was as planned. This was an Open Spaces conference and I thought it worked very well. From an email Eric Pugh sent:

Basically it all boils down to:

Open Space is the Law of Two Feet: if anyone finds themselves in a place where they are neither learning nor contributing they should move to somewhere more productive. And from the law flow four principles:

• Whoever comes are the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
…

Inspired by the Rail Spikes:

bash-3.2$ history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

228 cd

167 git

10 ssh

10 DEPLOY=production

6 sudo

6 pwd

6 ./script/import_views.rb

5 rm

4 rake

4 mv

bash-3.2$

Really interesting stats, I’d never guess that git is used more than ssh on my desktop (I’m a remote worker and mysql consultant so I ssh really often).

A

Ah, the perils of working in a shared, client environment. One client has us using a login that is not exclusive to us. I prefer using bash; the client is set to use zsh. This is not a problem in and of itself.

However, there is a section in the .profile that is causing me issues:

if [ -f /usr/bin/ksh ]; then
        /usr/bin/ksh -o vi
        exit
fi

So, “If ksh exists, run it with some options to edit history with vi-like commands”. Except what we really want is “If you’re using the ksh as a shell, . . . .”

So I added a modification, and now all is fine.

if [ -f /usr/bin/ksh ]; then
        if [ "$SHELL" = "/usr/bin/ksh" ]; then
                /usr/bin/ksh -o vi
                exit
        fi
fi

(not all my problems are MySQL related!)

A lot of you may already know this, but I am willing to bet there are more that don’t. I’m talking about the tee command in the bash shell, and in MySQL. For our purposes, we’ll talk about the tee command in MySQL.

Problem: You have a series of SQL statements whose results take up a few screens worth of output, and you need to take this output and send it to someone else (A DBA, MySQL Support, your mentor). You could just do a copy/paste from your terminal, but what if you realized in the end that your scroll back buffer isn’t as large as you thought it was?

Solution: Tee. Apparently, the mysql client comes with tee.

mysqlshell> tee mysqlog.sql ;
Logging to file ‘mysqlog.sql’
use dbname;
select foo from bar;
….
mysqlshell> notee;
…