Ben Halpern

Posted on Oct 19, 2017

What do you Google EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. and never just memorize?

#discuss

Discussion (250)

Valentin Baca • Oct 19 '17 • Edited on Oct 20

Converting Array<->List in Java*. Been coding Java for 6+ years and still don't care to learn/memorize this.
Objective-C block syntax
bash test format and flags
vim macro create and execute

I noticed I could never remember these, so I always make aliases, shell functions, or short ~/bin/ scripts for them instead:

tar: xkcd.com/1168/
netstat flags (other than "-tulpn" which I have memorized as "tull-pin" like "Tolkien")
ssh tunnel syntax

Edit: *in one-line.
Array to list:

String[] array = ...;
List<String> immutableList = Arrays.asList(array);
List<String> mutableList = new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList(array));

List to array:

List<String> list = ...;
String[] array = list.toArray(new String[list.size()]);

Clear as mud...

Oscar • Jul 11 '18

Helpful protip. I learned yesterday, that list.toArray(new String[0]) is faster than the version with the explicit size given.

Lynne Tye • Oct 19 '17

I was about to write the same thing. How to vertically align elements... without using flex 😂

Sarah Chima • Oct 19 '17

Regex. While I understand how it works and how it can be used, it's difficult for me to memorize the right regex that should be used at every point. So I just google whenever I want to make use of it. :)

Ben Halpern • Oct 19 '17

Oh yeah that's a big one

Tiago Marques • Oct 20 '17

I was just like that... but then I've found regex101.com/ and now, I'm almost proficiente writing regex!

gustavo • Nov 2 '17

regex101 is the single best resource I've ever found for regex.

Miff • Nov 2 '17

It's funny in my case. I know enough regex to get by, but I generally need to google to find out how to actually apply it.

Do I need RegExp.prototype.test or String.prototype.match in JS? What are the order of parameters in preg_match in PHP? What are the little parentheses things called in .NET, captures or groups?

Andrew • Nov 2 '17

I had the same problem, until I found Rubular:

rubular.com/

Bonus tip: making a permalink will also save all the test cases used. Makes for an excellent inline comment!

Roger Paviani • Oct 20 '17

Same here...
BTW, I knew someone must've been written about regular expressions when I read the title.. 😂

Kwabena Bio Berko • Oct 19 '17

Me too!
Hahaaahaa

George Offley • Oct 20 '17

I always have to Google regex. Or copied old code.

Jens Genberg • Oct 20 '17

I can never remember how it works either. I found this to be helpful, though! regexr.com/

Reynaldo Jose Abreu • Oct 20 '17 • Edited on Oct 20

Same here. I can only remember $,^,*,+ and /s /w. I always end up up googling an example and going from there.

Ben Halpern • Oct 19 '17

For me it's "manually start postgresql"

Every once in a while my postgres server isn't running and I know to punch that into my browser and land on this Stack Overflow question, where I proceed to copy this command into my terminal:

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start

It happens infrequently enough that I never bother to alias it or remember how to type it out. I just remember what to Google.

Galdin Raphael • Oct 19 '17

I have postgres installed via homebrew. So I use brew info postgres to copy the start command :)

lepinekong • May 25 '18

So did I then I realize how many precious minutes of my life I'm losing so I decided to buy a domain for 75 cents mycodesnippets.space :) I write things down little by little as soon as I need it the first time or I risk to never do it by lazyness !

Srikanth • Feb 11 '18

I was gonna say this. Have bookmarked the stackoverflow post on this. :D

Kaustav Banerjee • Oct 19 '17

cant you just sudo service postgresql start ? :P

shelby spees (she/her) • Aug 11 '18

On Linux, yes. On OSX, no unfortunately.

BinaryDigit • Oct 23 '17

I could never remember "rails new myapp --database=postgresql" :|

Kwaku Eshun • Oct 19 '17

Oh yes, I even googled and used this today because my service keeps stopping.

Amin Arria • Oct 19 '17

How to make a tar file...

damian • Oct 19 '17

at least extracting is easy (say it in a german accent) tar -xzf "xtract ze files"

Chrissy Wainwright • Oct 20 '17

and -czf == 'compress ze files'

Amin Mohamed Ajani • Oct 23 '17

well what works for me is tar -xzvf "xtract ze vucking files"
No kidding that's how remember it

BinaryDigit • Oct 23 '17

this...is actually brilliant! lol

Amin Arria • Oct 20 '17

That's a great way! Jajajaaj

But it's important to note that tar is smart enough to detect the format so I prefer the general tar -vxf

Florian Reuschel • Jun 19 '18

Even though as a German with decent English pronunciation this is a little bit insulting, I'll probably never forget this ever again. Thanks! 🙈

Dean Bassett • Oct 20 '17

Thank you so much.

Jonas Gauffin • Jun 15 '18 • Edited on Jun 15

Isn't that for zipped tar files? -xzf = extract zipped (tar) file.

tbodt • Oct 21 '17 • Edited on Oct 21

B. Agustín Amenábar Larraín • Jun 25 '18

I threw this one at a dev I used to work with. He answered instantly, he could have disarmed 2 bombs with that speed.

Instant respect gained

Sanjayshr • Oct 23 '17 • Edited on Oct 23

I figured out how to remember it. To create tar, use c option and for extracting replace c with x ==> $tar will remain same for both Lol :) . tar -cvf filename.tar file/dir_path && tar -xvf filename.tar.

brandonhowkins02 • Oct 24 '20 • Edited on Oct 24

Hey, I also want to make a tar file for my website name:Lenny face. Let me know if the given suggestions works for you!

Dave Jacoby • Oct 19 '17

sed and awk and how to use them.

Tony • Oct 20 '17

Creating SSH Keys

Martin Kiesel • Jun 4 '18

I just ssh-k ↑ in zsh and just list all previous key generation commands or if I am not sure what I am looking for I use fzf

# fh - repeat history
fh() {
  print -z $( ([ -n "$ZSH_NAME" ] && fc -l 1 || history) | fzf +s --tac | sed 's/ *[0-9]* *//')
}

Chad Kunde • Apr 28 '18

I was helping someone with this earlier this year. Ended up creating a helper for it:

gist.github.com/Kunde21/3633e1e9ef...

Mathieu PATUREL • Oct 19 '17

Suprised tldr didn't got mentioned.

It's a pretty neat tool to do this kind of things...

@ScottFred • Apr 26 '18

That's awesome! thanks

ImTheDeveloper • Oct 20 '17

Best link I've seen all week. Heroic!!!!!

Aidan Harding • Oct 20 '17

Javascript array methods. Is this one in-place, or returning a new array? I don't know, but MDN does!

z0al • Oct 19 '17

How to extract tar.gz file in Linux command line!

Dean Bassett • Oct 20 '17 • Edited on Oct 20

Saw a comment from above and it changed my life.

tar -xzf filename xzf = "Xtract Ze Files!" (german accent)

ErwanDavid • Oct 21 '17

Excellent, noté that you may get ride of the dash.

Galdin Raphael • Oct 19 '17 • Edited on Oct 19

tar -xf filename

Read as tar eXtract File filename.
Saw this on an SO answer and never had to google it ever again :)

z0al • Oct 20 '17

Wow, I never thought of it.

Thanks :)

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Oct 20 '17

And centering things. Completely clueless every time.

Andrew • Nov 2 '17

here's a handy multiple choice questionnaire!

howtocenterincss.com/

Michael Minshew • Apr 9 '18

holy crap, whoever made this site needs a medal. Great recommendation!!!

ImTheDeveloper • Oct 19 '17

Everything git related

harry_wood • Apr 24 '18

Yeah. For some reason I really find some git procedures harder to memorise than others. It's ludicrous the number of times I've googled "git unadd a file" and "git reset branch to remote"

Igal Tabachnik • Oct 20 '17

How to delete a remote branch in git.

ItsASine (Kayla) • Oct 21 '17

Cherry picking commits in git, because I can never remember if it's cherrypick or cherry-pick

A more efficient way would be to just do it and correct if it errors, or alias it to git cherry or something

Also, how to exit vim, and how to insert in vim, and basically how on Earth did I end up in vim omg get me out

Eljay-Adobe • Jun 11 '18

I've been using Vim now for about 24 years. Primarily because I don't know how to quit.

Sakib Hadžiavdić • Oct 19 '17

How to "unignore" files with git... Here is a nice and short way.

Bart Karalus • Oct 20 '17

I would be responsible for 95% of hits coming from google search into the Tutorialpoint's html5 minimal template. Now I could easily type it in every time I set up a new page, but it is now a matter of extreme laziness I think.

Paula • Oct 19 '17

This is stupid but g++ compiling filename and output order in the terminal. I've been doing it for four years now and still failing to remember.

Kevin Le • Oct 19 '17

regex

Stefan Hecker • Oct 20 '17

The same with me!! But I found VerbalExpressions (github.com/VerbalExpressions) to have solved it for me.

Kevin Le • Oct 23 '17

That is very good to know about.

Ferocit • Nov 2 '17

I usually just go to regexr.com and trial-and-error the syntax until it matches what I want.

Ryan Haber • Oct 20 '17

Regex kills me sometimes.

Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers • Oct 19 '17

How to find out which process is listening on a certain point on my mac. I'm often switching between projects, and have a server from another project running on a port that I now need for another server.

And it looks like Heroku's CLI doesn't always stop all processes correctly when you stop it using ctrl+c

Palle • Oct 21 '17 • Edited on Oct 21

You could add a function to your .bashrc to make this easier:

listening() {
    lsof -n -iTCP:$1 | grep LISTEN
}

Then (after restarting your terminal or typing source ~/.bashrc) type listening 8080 to find out what process is blocking that port.

Loïc Giraudel • Oct 20 '17

ln -s [source] [destination] or ln -s [destination] [source] ?
find . -name [...] -exec grep '...' {} \;

And of course sed, awk and more generally shell syntax (if, loops, switch, etc).

Šimon Let • Jun 17 '18

I got a good way to remember argument order for ln:
Destination is optional so it must go second.
By default ln creates a link with the name of the source in the current directory.

Elliot Derhay • Jun 16 '18

Oh yeah, linking. Forgot about that one (obviously, since I need to Google it every time lol).

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Oct 19 '17

How to properly write a Rails migration file.

Add a column? Huh? What???

Ben Halpern • Oct 19 '17

Oh yeah. I always copy and paste from old files.

Ukaza Perdana • Dec 30 '17 • Edited on Dec 30

IIRC:

rails g migration AddStuffToTableName new_column1:integer new_column2:text #etc. etc.

Sourav Ghosh • Oct 20 '17

How to exit vim.

Michael Whitis • Oct 20 '17

Many moons ago, at one of my first jobs, I got myself in trouble with this. I was editing something in prod without knowing how to save or exit. I was a windows nt guy mostly. So, like one does, I hard-rebooted the server instead of asking for help... After the dust cleared, my boss made me sit at a keyboard for over an hour launching vim and learning how to at least save and exit. :) I have :wq, :q,:q! burned into my muscle memory to this day...

shelby spees (she/her) • Aug 11 '18

Oh god why did they have the new guy making changes in prod you poor soul

George Offley • Oct 20 '17

How to spell maintenance.

Albrecht Scheidig • Oct 25 '17

That's unneccessarrelly, but true.

Jim Schubert • Feb 10 '18

I don't have to Google the spelling, but I'd say 99% of the time I type "valud". I say it correctly as "val-id" and only mistype because of the QWERTY keyboard layout. This is the only word that I consistently type incorrectly. It's not a speed thing (like "teh"), because it happens when typing slowly as well. I've been typing for a really long time and I'm beginning to think my brain just thinks this is a funny prank.

Angelika Tyborska • Oct 20 '17

This! Plus a few other words: convenient, conscience, accommodate. I'm not a native speaker ;).

Robin Goupil • Oct 22 '17

As a non native english speaker:

slice()

splice()

Brett Stevenson • Oct 19 '17

Usually, anything that is outside of my basic Git workflow.

Rob Cameron • Oct 19 '17 • Edited on Oct 19

Find a file in Linux. I know it involves "find" and "name" but I have to look up the exact syntax each time. (For reference, the sledgehammer version is find . -name testfile.txt from the root of the drive.)

Gilberto Alexandre dos Santos • Oct 20 '17

PHP array_push and array_key_exists parameters order.

Janne "Lietu" Enberg • Oct 20 '17

this alone should tell you you need to use another language ;)

Daan Wilmer • Nov 5 '17

Argument orders in all array functions in PHP for me. That's just horrible. VSCode gives hints though, so that helps. I still have to look up the exact names of functions regularly, though.

Anton Linevych • Mar 22 '18 • Edited on Mar 22

How to type this: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ben Halpern • Mar 22 '18

Ha! Me too. I know to go straight to textfac.es

Den McHenry • Jun 16 '18

The best thing they ever added to Slack was the /shrug command.

Aswath KNM • Oct 20 '17

unzip a tar file especially with that different extensions .xz , .bz etc..

vim commands to cut,copy and paste

regex in python and other python builtins . Can't memorize the whole docs right ?

Aaron Santos • Dec 22 '17

vim...

Alejandro • Oct 21 '17

text-overflow: ellipsis

Kasey Speakman • Oct 19 '17

Updating the list of git remote branches. It doesn't refresh when you sync so it will continue to list remote branches that don't even exist anymore until you manually run the command below. (Which I had to google again to put in this comment.)

git remote update origin --prune