zsh for Rational Mortals

As someone who’s spent years having to replace bash with zsh in every system I don’t understand this question. I’m a big zsh fan, check out zplug to do some awesome stuff really easily. — Scott J Roberts (@sroberts) June 4, 2019 This post, my first in quite awhile, is inspired by my good friend Phil. I understand these sorts of changes, and why they give people pause, but I see this as a big step forward....

June 5, 2019 · 5 min · Scott J Roberts

pbcopy and pbpaste

pbpaste & pbcopy give you direct access to the OSX clipboard from a shell and makes it easy to tie together data from GUI based apps with command line apps. pbpaste So say you use ⌘+c to copy something from a browser that you want to then feed through a command line tool like ./jq: $ pbpaste | jq ‘.’ pbpaste feeds the text from the clipboard to jq through standard in, which then allows jq to manipulate it as you see fit....

May 15, 2015 · 1 min · Scott J Roberts

Learning Git and GitHub

I suppose it makes sense that when you work for a company everyone assumes you know everything about using its products. When I worked at Symantecs Managed Security Services people asked me all the time how to use the antivirus. It’s a normal assumption, even if it’s off base. So working at GitHub I get asked git & GitHub questions all the time. #REALTALK: The fact is I’m not a great Git user....

November 11, 2014 · 4 min · Scott J Roberts

Command-line Spell Checking with Aspell

In an effort to improve my “Unix” skills I’m trying to do more and more on the command line, such as writing this blog. This has worked out for me in a lot of ways, making much of my work faster, less environment dependent, and easier to reproduce/script. I’ve learned lots of tricks to help with this, but recently came across one of the best ones: Aspell. First a confession: people get into the computer industry for lots of reasons....

January 20, 2014 · 2 min · Scott J Roberts

Pretty JSON is Pretty (Useful)

So as initially suggested I haven’t been good about blogging yet. I’ve been quite busy with work. But I did want to pass along one small tip I’ve picked up. A lot of the work I’ve been doing has been a combination of Ruby/Python and command line data parsing. In much of this shell I’m working through JSON documents on the command line, often using commands like: $ cat foo.txt | grep “foo” | sort | uniq I’ve learned a lot about composing commands and the beauty of the Unix philosophy, it’s been great....

January 14, 2014 · 2 min · Scott J Roberts