Skip to content

Top 3 Bash Hacks To Boost Your Performance

Top 3 Bash Hacks To Boost Your Performance

Find the list of the bash performance hacks I use all the time and they can help you save a lot of time in your daily job.

Top 3 Bash Hacks To Boost Your Performance
Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Bash hacks knowledge is one of the ways to improve your performance. We spend many hours inside of them and have been developing patterns and habits when we log inside a computer. For example, if you have two people with a similar skill level and provide the same task to do, probably, they’re different tools aa nd different comet to the same path.

And that’s because the number of options available to do any task is so significant that each of us learns one or two way to do something, and we sticks to them, and we just automate those, so we’re not thinking when we’re typing them.

So, the idea today is to provide a list of some commands that I use all the time that probably you’re aware of, but for me are like time savings each day of my work life. So, let’s start with those.

1.- CTRL + R

This command is my predliect bash hack. It is the one I use all the time; as soon as I log into a remote machine that is new or just coming back to them, I use it for pretty much everything. Unfortunately, this command only allows you to search into the command history.

It helps you autocomplete based on the commands you’re already typing. It’s like the same thing as typing history | grep <something> but just faster and more natural for me.

This bash hack also allows me to autocomplete paths that I don’t remember the exact subfolder name or whatever. I do this tricky command every two weeks to clean some process memory or apply some configuration. Or just to troubleshoot in which machine I’m logging at a specific moment.

2.- find + action

Find command is something we all know, but most of you probably use it as a limited functionality from all the ones available from the find command. And that’s it because that command is incredible. It provides so many features. But this time, I’m just going to cover one specific topic. Actions after locating the files that we’re looking for.

We usually use the find command to find files or folders, which is evident for a command that it’s called that way. But also it allows us to add the -execparameter to concatenate an action to be done for each of the files that match your criteria, for example, something like this

Find all the yaml files in your current folder and just rename them to move them to a different folder. You can do it directly with this command:

find . -name “*.yaml” -exec mv {} /tmp/folder/yamlFiles/ \;

3.- cd –

So simple and so helpful bash hack. Just like our bash command to CTRL-Z. The command cd -allows us to go back to the previous folder we’re in.

So valuable for we got wrong the folder that we like to go, just to switch between two folders and so on quickly. It’s like going back to your browser or the CTRL -Z in your Word processor.

Wrap up

I hope you love this command as much as I do, and if you already know it, please let me in the responses to the bash hacks that are the most relevant for you daily. It can be because you use it all the time as I do with these or because even if you’re not using it so many times, the times that you do, it saves you a massive amount of time!