$ cd ~/.snippets
$ ls -1
credit_card
email
@example.com
phone
RAILS_ENV=test
sql_create
sql_permissions
$ cat credit_card 
4111111111111111
$ cat sql_permissions 
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON .* TO ''@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY ''
$ cat phone 
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
print (1..12).map {i i == 4  i == 8 ? '-' : rand(10).to_s}.join

Then I put this little script in ~/bin:

#!/bin/bash
# http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=71938
DIR=${HOME}/.snippets
DMENU_ARGS="-i -fn -*-terminal-*-*-*-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" # xfontsel to select font
 
FILE=`/bin/ls $DIR | /usr/bin/dmenu ${DMENU_ARGS}`
 
if [ -x ${DIR}/${FILE} ]; then #executable
echo -n `${DIR}/${FILE}` | xsel -b -i
elif [ -f ${DIR}/${FILE} ]; then
cat ${DIR}/${FILE} | xsel -b -i
fi
xdotool key ctrl+v # for non-console
xdotool key ctrl+shift+v # for console

And then I mapped that script to a handy key combination in compiz. So now whenever I need a test credit card number, phone number, or email address I can just do c, type the first few characters to select the right snippet, hit return and it gets pasted in to whatever I’m working on.

Notes and caveats:

• I had to aptitude install some packages to get dmenu and xdotool to work.
• dmenu is ugly and has no mouse support.
• Pasting into vim has occasional issues.

These are standard shell tools, but sometimes I get confused about which one I need. So my way of thinking about it is that pipes are a connection between programs while redirection always goes to (or from) a file.

So, for example, in order to find all my session routes I would connect the rake and grep commands via a pipe:

  rake routes | grep session

On the other hand, I would use redirection to save the output of a git diff to a file so as to be able to feed it in to the patch program (which expects its input on standard in).

  git diff > patchfile
  patch < patchfile

Braces

I just learned about these recently and they make renaming things so much easier!

  mv file.old file.new # old way
  mv file.{old,new} # does the same thing!

So creating your database.yml file from the example one is as easy as:

  mv config/database.yml{.example,}

Changing Directories

I assume everyone already knows that cd with arguments goes to your home directory (the contents of the $HOME environment variable), but did you know you can do 'cd -' to go to the previous directory you were in ($OLDPWD)?

  :/var/www$ cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
  :/etc/apache2/sites-enabled$ cd -
  /var/www
  :/var/www$

History

!! # execute the previous command (great for when you forget to sudo something)
!$ # The last argument of the previous command
!^ # The first argument
!* # All the previous arguments
^old^new^ # Repeat the previous command replacing old for new

And lots, lots more! See 'man history' for details.

Keyboard shortcuts

Here are a few of the keyboard shortcuts that I use regularly (copied from the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash):

CTRL + l : clears the screen content (equivalent to the command : clear).
CTRL + u : clears the line content before the cursor and copy it in the clipboard.
CTRL + k : clears thctrl alt copy pastee line content after the cursor and copy it in the clipboard.
CTRL + w : clears the word before the cursor and copy it in the clipboard.
CTRL + y : (yank) adds the clipboard content from the cursor position.

Host server
HostName server.example.com
User username
 
Host another
HostName another.example.com
User username

Now you can just ssh server instead of ssh username@example.server.com. SCP also works great with these aliases, just scp file.txt server:/path

You can leave the User part out of the config file if your local and remote usernames are the same.

Free VMWare server limits running virtual servers to 4. Our solution was to purchase new servers equipped with 1 SATA disk for the OS and 4 SCSI disks, 1 for each virtual machine (VM). While VMWare offers an option to write to the disk directly I opted not to do that because the virtual disk files VMWare uses make your VM’s highly portable and easy to duplicate. Disaster recovery practice becomes far easier when you can easily make a duplicate of your production server.

This architecture’s utility was brought to light when one of your servers died. We were able to pull the disks containing our production servers, copy the VM’s to another server, then get those servers running again quickly. There was no need for OS reinstall or recovery from backup and because of this portability downtime was minimized.

I have VMWare server installed on my Windows workstation with a Centos 5 VM running in the background. I use it for some MySQL and PHP stuff so it isn’t used a whole lot but I hardly know it’s there. The beauty of this that the Windows guys can have a Linux VM and the Linux guys can have a Windows VM. That can help quite a bit when testing browser compatibility on a website or getting access to a tool not available for your OS of choice.

VMWare server has helped us utilize our server resources better at a very minimal cost. Running 4 servers for the price of one saves us time and money. What else could you ask for?