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The nice thing about these tools is you can count on them being on any unix machine w/o worry about installing them on a remote locked down box of some kind. Yo

The nice thing about these tools is you can count on them being on any unix machine w/o worry about installing them on a remote locked down box of some kind. You can also avoid any dependency complexity. They can be real awkward to remember however and the man pages can sometimes be a handful, so I try to store common idioms in gists or in my .bash_profile whenever I develop one.

Anthony-G 12y ago
With regard to cross-platform compatibility, it's worth knowing some of the basic differences between GNU sed and BSD sed. I like the GNU extensions -- particularly the extensions to regular expression such as non-printing characters (e.g. `\t`) and character classes such as `\w` and `\b`. I almost always use the GNU `-i, --in-place` option once I'm satisfied that my sed commands do what I want. A couple of years ago, I was using my other half's Mac (OS X 10.4 with a very old version of BSD sed) and I really missed the GNU extensions. When you say you store common idioms in your Bash profile, do you mean storing the commands as Bash aliases or functions? I have similar issues with remembering syntax and building sed commands and I've been trying to do something similar to avoid spending time building a complex command from scratch when I already created a similar one some time previously.
- sbilstein 12y ago
  I usually store things as aliases...and while sometimes I don't end up using the alias exactly having a useful name that describes what it does helps me tailor the command later on. For example I have the following alias 'watch_port' that looks like this: sudo ngrep -W byline -d en6 -qilw 'get|post' tcp dst port so `watchport 8080` will print all network traffic over port 8080 on my ethernet. I actually rarely use this as 'watch_port' directly, but it helps me remember quickly how to bend ngrep to my needs.
  - Anthony-G 12y ago
    Thanks for the response. I used to keep a list of long commands that I had constructed in a plain text file, titled `useful-commands.txt` but that became too unwieldy. Now, similar to you, I try to store them as aliases – even if I don’t use the command exactly as it was saved. The hard part is coming up with a good, succinct name (descriptive but not too long) for the alias. For a long time, I didn’t like using aliases because I didn’t want to become overly reliant on my custom aliases – and then miss them when working on an unfamiliar system. This generally worked out alright when I was able to use `Ctrl-R` with a large Bash history. Now, I think that was an irrational rationale and that aliases are very useful shell features. I’m currently trying to organise my aliases and functions into useful groups such as `home_aliases.sh`, `cygwin_aliases.sh`, etc. so that they can be loaded as needed. I then plan on adding them to a git repository so that they can easily be used – and updated – on different systems. BTW, thanks for letting me know about ngrep. It looks like a useful complement to tcpdump.

Anthony-G 12y ago

With regard to cross-platform compatibility, it's worth knowing some of the basic differences between GNU sed and BSD sed. I like the GNU extensions -- particularly the extensions to regular expression such as non-printing characters (e.g. `\t`) and character classes such as `\w` and `\b`. I almost always use the GNU `-i, --in-place` option once I'm satisfied that my sed commands do what I want. A couple of years ago, I was using my other half's Mac (OS X 10.4 with a very old version of BSD sed) and I really missed the GNU extensions. When you say you store common idioms in your Bash profile, do you mean storing the commands as Bash aliases or functions? I have similar issues with remembering syntax and building sed commands and I've been trying to do something similar to avoid spending time building a complex command from scratch when I already created a similar one some time previously.

sbilstein 12y ago
I usually store things as aliases...and while sometimes I don't end up using the alias exactly having a useful name that describes what it does helps me tailor the command later on. For example I have the following alias 'watch_port' that looks like this: sudo ngrep -W byline -d en6 -qilw 'get|post' tcp dst port so `watchport 8080` will print all network traffic over port 8080 on my ethernet. I actually rarely use this as 'watch_port' directly, but it helps me remember quickly how to bend ngrep to my needs.
- Anthony-G 12y ago
  Thanks for the response. I used to keep a list of long commands that I had constructed in a plain text file, titled `useful-commands.txt` but that became too unwieldy. Now, similar to you, I try to store them as aliases – even if I don’t use the command exactly as it was saved. The hard part is coming up with a good, succinct name (descriptive but not too long) for the alias. For a long time, I didn’t like using aliases because I didn’t want to become overly reliant on my custom aliases – and then miss them when working on an unfamiliar system. This generally worked out alright when I was able to use `Ctrl-R` with a large Bash history. Now, I think that was an irrational rationale and that aliases are very useful shell features. I’m currently trying to organise my aliases and functions into useful groups such as `home_aliases.sh`, `cygwin_aliases.sh`, etc. so that they can be loaded as needed. I then plan on adding them to a git repository so that they can easily be used – and updated – on different systems. BTW, thanks for letting me know about ngrep. It looks like a useful complement to tcpdump.