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Bad terminal habits

Jesse Sibley on November 30, 2018

Recently I realised how poor my terminal etiquette really is. I seem to run clear just about every other line. I think this is probably the dev's equivalent to the english filler word 'um' - usually used when actually thinking about what to say next.

Do you have any bad terminal habits?

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Ondrej

I have hardcoded one.

alias rm 'rm -rf'
funcsave rm

See, you are not so bad at all :)

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Jesse Sibley

Ha! That's an interesting one... personally aliases account for a lot of my terminal laziness/bad habits but at the end of the day, they save a few keystrokes!

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Ondrej

Though I wouldn't recommend my mentioned alias. Still I cannot get rid of it and I personally don't know why ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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Jay R. Wren

ctrl-l is a faster clear. I don't use it often, but I do use it.

bad habit which annoys me to see: needlessly cd into a dir when you could tab complete a command for actions on files in that dir.

My bad habit: relying on shell history instead of saving aliases and scripts. I'll write a 300+ character chain of shell commands and not save it anywhere, just ctrl-r to find it in my history... until its a year later and I wonder wtf I did with it.

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Dian Fay

I've piped curl into bash once or twice. It's so convenient, and it's not like I'd have rigorously inspected every line of a downloaded install script anyway.

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Thomas H Jones II

The CLI equivalent of hitting "yes" on an EULA page. =)

Though, less so if it's your URL you're piping to an interpreter.

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derek
  • Alias all the things. So if I'm in a new env I usually type commands that aren't there due to muscle memory.
  • Not being more deliberate in fine tuning file/dir permissions.
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David J Eddy

Does using cheat.sh/ via the terminal count as 'bad habit'?