I’ve been setting up a new Proxmox server and messing around with VMs, and wanted to know what kind of useful commands I’m missing out on. Bonus points for a little explainer.

Journalctl | grep -C 10 'foo' was useful for me when I needed to troubleshoot some fstab mount fuckery on boot. It pipes Journalctl (boot logs) into grep to find ‘foo’, and prints 10 lines before and after each instance of ‘foo’.

  • @InFerNo@lemmy.ml
    29•4 months ago

    I use $_ a lot, it allows you to use the last parameter of the previous command in your current command

    mkdir something && cd $_

    nano file
    chmod +x $_

    As a simple example.

    If you want to create nested folders, you can do it in one go by adding -p to mkdir

    mkdir -p bunch/of/nested/folders

    Good explanation here:
    https://koenwoortman.com/bash-mkdir-multiple-subdirectories/q

    Sometimes starting a service takes a while and you’re sitting there waiting for the terminal to be available again. Just add --no-block to systemctl and it will do it on the background without keeping the terminal occupied.

    systemctl start --no-block myservice

    • WillEnglish
      5•4 months ago

      For interactive editing, the keybind alt+. inserts the last argument from the previous command. Using this instead of $_ has the potential to make your shell history a little more explicit. (vim $_ isn’t as likely to work a few commands later, but vim actual_file.sh might)

        • pssk
          2•4 months ago

          You can use M-. instead of $_ to insert last param of last command. You can also access older commands’ param by repeated M-. just like you would do for inserting past commands with up arrow or C-p

      • @wheezy@lemmy.ml
        5•4 months ago

        I have my .bashrc print useful commands with a short explanation. This way I see them regularly when I start a new session. Once I use a command enough that I have it as part of my toolkit I remove it from the print.

    • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1•3 months ago

      Is there a version of $_ that works with mv? It just keeps renaming my files to “filedir,” I’m trying sort through a directory and move some files to another for keeping, be easier if I could do:

      mv picture1.jpg /path/to/keepdirectory

      then do something like

      mv picture2.jpg $_

      And so on. But with that I’d just be renaming all my photos “filedir” instead of moving them lol.

      • @InFerNo@lemmy.ml
        2•12 hours ago

        I just tried your use case, and it did move the files to the correct folder.

        using zsh:

         user@computer  ~  touch test.jpg
 user@computer  ~  touch test2.jpg
 user@computer  ~  mv test.jpg ./Public 
 user@computer  ~  mv test2.jpg $_
 user@computer  ~  ls ./Public 
test2.jpg  test.jpg
 user@computer  ~ 

        using bash:

        [user@computer Public]$ mkdir test
[user@computer Public]$ ls
test  test2.jpg  test.jpg
[user@computer Public]$ mv test.jpg ./test
[user@computer Public]$ mv test2.jpg $_
[user@computer Public]$ ls
test
[user@computer Public]$ ls test/
test2.jpg  test.jpg
[user@computer Public]$

        using bash and full path:

        [user@computer Public]$ ls
test  test2.jpg  test.jpg
[user@computer Public]$ mv test.jpg /home/user/Public/test
[user@computer Public]$ mv test2.jpg $_
[user@computer Public]$ ls
test
[user@computer Public]$ ls test/
test2.jpg  test.jpg
[user@computer Public]$

        What shell are you using? You can check it by using echo $0.

         user@computer  ~  echo $0
/usr/bin/zsh

        [user@computer ~]$ echo $0
/bin/bash

        I can’t reproduce it, even when putting the directory path in quotes, it still simply moved the file.

        • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1•11 hours ago

          On bash I found out alt+. puts the last last parameter back up, and you can hit it again to keep cycling, that’s what I’ve been using.