I often want to know the status code of a curl request, but I don’t want that extra information to mess with the response body that it prints to stdout.

What to do?

Render an image instead, of course!

curlcat takes the same params as curl, but it uses iTerm2’s imgcat tool to draw an “HTTP Cat” of the status code.

It even sends the image to stderr instead of stdout, so you can still pipe curlcat to jq or something.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

stdoutfile=$( mktemp )
curl -sw "\n%{http_code}" $@ > $stdoutfile
exitcode=$?

if [[ $exitcode == 0 ]]; then
  statuscode=$( cat $stdoutfile | tail -1 )

  if [[ ! -f $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode ]]; then
    curl -so $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode https://http.cat/$statuscode
  fi

  imgcat $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode 1>&2
fi

cat $stdoutfile | ghead -n -1

exit $exitcode

Note: This is macOS-specific, as written, but as long as your terminal supports images, you should be able to adapt it just fine.

I wrote a script called please. You input please followed by any other command (e.g. please git clone, please wget blahblah) and a robotic voice will say “affirmative,” then the command will run, and when it completes, the robotic voice reads out the exit code (e.g. “completed successfully” or “failed with status 1” etc.)

This is useful for when you have a command that takes a long time and you want to be alerted when it’s finished. And it’s a gentleman.

Here are probably the most useful ones. I prefer for rm to be interactive so I don’t accidentally delete something important and for mkdir to create a parent directory if necessary.

alias rm='rm -i'
alias mkdir='mkdir -p'
alias podup='podman-compose down && podman-compose pull && podman-compose up -d'

This extract function (which I didn’t make myself, I got it from when I was using nakeDeb) has been pretty useful too.

function extract()
{
     if [ -f $1 ] ; then
         case $1 in
             *.tar.bz2)   tar xvjf $1     ;;
             *.tar.gz)    tar xvzf $1     ;;
             *.bz2)       bunzip2 $1      ;;
             *.rar)       unrar x $1      ;;
             *.gz)        gunzip $1       ;;
             *.tar)       tar xvf $1      ;;
             *.tbz2)      tar xvjf $1     ;;
             *.tgz)       tar xvzf $1     ;;
             *.zip)       unzip $1        ;;
             *.Z)         uncompress $1   ;;
             *.7z)        7z x $1         ;;
             *.xz)        unxz $1         ;;
             *)           echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via >extract<" ;;
         esac
     else
         echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
     fi
}

alias fucking='sudo' (my coworkers often used prettyplease instead)

alias clip='xclip -selection clipboard'

When you pipe to this, for example ls | clip, it will stick the output of the command ran into the clipboard without needing to manually copy the output.

alias sl=“ls“

#Create a dir and cd into it
mkcd() { mkdir -p "$@" && cd "$@"; }

alias fuck='sudo $(history -p \!\!)'

One of favorites cds to the root of a project directory from a subdirectory,

# Changes to top-level directory of git repository.
alias gtop="cd \$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"

For doing stuff in a directory, I use a replacement for cd command.

For aliases:

alias +='git add'
alias +p='git add -p'
alias +u='git add -u'
alias -- -='cd -'
alias @='for i in'
alias c='cargo'
alias date='LANG=C date'
alias diff='cdiff'
alias gg='git grep -n'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias ll='ls -o'
alias ls='ls -vFT0 --si --color=auto --time-style=long-iso'
alias rmd='rmdir'

I also have various small scripts and functions:

• a for package management (think apt but has simplified arguments which makes it faster to use in usual cases),
• e for opening file in Emacs,
• g for git,
• s for sudo.

And here’s ,:

$ cat ~/.local/bin/,
#!/bin/sh

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
	paste -sd,
else
	printf '%s\n' "$@" | paste -sd,
fi

This tmux wrapper is remarkably convenient:

Usage:

# Usage: t [session-name]
#
# With no arguments:
#   Lists existing tmux sessions, or prints "[No sessions]" if none exist.
#
# With a session name:
#   Attempts to attach to the named tmux session.
#   If the session does not exist, creates a new session with that name.
#
# Examples:
#   t            # Lists all tmux sessions
#   t dev        # Attaches to "dev" session or creates it if it doesn't exist

function t {
	if [[ -z $1 ]]; then
		tmux ls 2> /dev/null || echo "[No sessions]"
	else
		tmux attach -t $@ 2> /dev/null
		if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
			tmux new -s $@
		fi
	fi
}

$ which diffuc
diffuc: aliased to diff -uw --color=always

$ which grepnir
grepnir: aliased to grep -niIr

$ cat `which ts`
#!/bin/bash

if [ "$#" -lt 1 ]; then
                tmux list-sessions
                exit
fi

if ! tmux attach -t "$1"
then
                tmux new-session -s "$1"
fi

I have a few interesting ones.

Download a video:

alias yt="yt-dlp -o '%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s' "

Execute the previous command as root:

alias please='sudo $(fc -n -l -1)'

Delete all the Docker things. I do this surprisingly often:

alias docker-nuke="docker system prune --all --volumes --force"

This is a handy one for detecting a hard link

function is-hardlink {
  count=$(stat -c %h -- "${1}")
  if [ "${count}" -gt 1 ]; then
    echo "Yes.  There are ${count} links to this file."
  else
    echo "Nope.  This file is unique."
  fi
}

I run this one pretty much every day. Regardless of the distro I’m using, it Updates All The Things:

function up {
  if [[ $(command -v yay) ]]; then
    yay -Syu --noconfirm
    yay -Yc --noconfirm
  elif [[ $(command -v apt) ]]; then
    sudo apt update
    sudo apt upgrade -y
    sudo apt autoremove -y
  fi
  flatpak update --assumeyes
  flatpak remove --unused --assumeyes
}

I maintain an aliases file in GitLab with all the stuff I have in my environment if anyone is curious.

alias gimme='git checkout'

on most of my systems I get tired of constantly lsing after a cd so I combine them:

cd(){
    cd $1 && ls
}

(excuse if this doesn’t work, I am writing this from memory)

I also wrote a function to access docker commands quicker on my Truenas system. If passed nothing, it enters the docker jailmaker system, else it passes the command to docker running inside the system.

docker () {
        if [[ "$1" == "" ]]; then
                jlmkr shell docker
                return
        else
                sudo systemd-run --pipe --machine docker docker "$@"
                return
        fi
}

I have a few similar shortcuts for programs inside jailmaker and long directories that I got sick of typing out.