When working in a shell, from time to time, I need to know if a command succeeded or failed. Sometimes, it’s easy:
$ make noise
make: *** No rule to make target `noise'. Stop.
Sometimes, less so:
$ grep frog podcasts.json > podcasts-about-frogs.txt
Since, alas, I don’t have any podcasts about frogs, that command would fail silently. But that’s fixable!
$ grep frog podcasts.json > podcasts-about-frogs.txt
$ # Bash/Zsh
$ echo $?
1
$ # Fish
$ echo $status
1
Working in security/operations in the tech industry, I use SSH a lot. To various different machines (some with hostnames, some without), using various different users and keys, and often (as was the case in my previous post) via a bastion host. Over the years, I’ve collected a number of SSH tricks that make my life easier.
On of the advantages of working in computer programming is that I can work from anywhere I have a computer and an internet connection. One of the disadvantages is that many of the resources that I need to do my job are locked to only be accessible within a specific network (albeit with a bastion host).
I long ago set up my SSH config to create an SSH tunnel and I can proxy many applications through that just by setting the HTTP_PROXY and/or HTTPS_PROXY environment variables. The downside of this though is that if I’m actually on a ‘safe’ network, there’s no reason to use the bastion host and I would actually be putting extra load on it.
My goal: write something that would let me automatically proxy applications when I need to but not when I don’t.
Whenever I create my yearly reading list, I need a way to order the books. Sure, I could just shuffle them normally, but that leads me to the temptation of cheating and re-shuffling them so that the books I want to read most are first. What I really need is a shuffle that will shuffle the same way every time.
Enter: hashsort
Relatively recently, I switched my last Windows machine over to OSX. For the most part, it’s been great. One bit of functionality that I’ve been missing though is AeroSnap. Specifically the ability to use a keyboard shortcut to move windows to the left/right half of a monitor.
Loving data as much as I do, I like to optimize things. To make sure I’m actually going the right way, it’s useful to time things. While it’s trivial in most languages to add timing, it’s even easier if you don’t have to.
I do like having my dotfiles on GitHub. For one, it means that they’re always available when I set up a new machine. For two, others can see them and take whatever is interesting for their own dotfiles. But all that has a disadvantage: what if I want to store my SSH configs?
I’ve been using Docker a fair bit at work, so I’ve added a few quick aliases to my dotfiles make that a little bit easier:
docker-bash - attach a bash shell to the first available docker instancedocker-stop-all - stop all running docker instancesA couple of quick additions to my dotfiles today:
git find-fat - find large files that no longer existgit trim-fat - remove files entirely from git history