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2020-07-21 06:49:32 +10:00

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<title>Speed up your shell game</title>
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<h3><a class="ablack" href="speed-up-your-shell-game.html">
Speed up your shell game
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<!-- bashblog_timestamp: #201904212222.21# -->
<div class="subtitle">April 21, 2019 &mdash;
Jesse Harris
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<p>Part of good use of the shell is doing repetitive things fast. A GUI can often
be faster than using the command line because you can almost select things with
your eyes ( eg, shift click files in a list to copy selectively. ) You can't
always use a gui, however.</p>
<hr />
<p>Perhaps your forced to move files around through the terminal. Today I was faced
with such a task and to make matters worse, the files were quite large. So
copying them individually would take a long time, and running them in parallel
by using the <code>&amp;</code> trick would have lead to huge io issues.</p>
<p>By defining a few quick and dirty functions, I was able to make my job a lot
easier:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>add - This functions will take a single argument to add a file to a list of
files to process later</p>
<pre><code> function add() { echo &quot;${1}&quot; &gt;&gt; ~/list.txt; }
</code></pre>
</li>
<li><p>l - This one is a quick shortcut to list files starting with a particular
letter. I used this to make shorter lists to scan through as I had quite a
few files to look at.</p>
<pre><code> function l() { ls | grep -i &quot;^$1.*&quot;; }
</code></pre>
</li>
<li><p>upload - This one will read the list and upload files that haven't been
copied yet and are available in the current relative directory.</p>
<pre><code> function upload() {
cat ~/list.txt | while read p
do
[[ -f &quot;${p}&quot; ]] &amp;&amp;
[[ ! -f /media/extHDD/&quot;${p}&quot; ]] &amp;&amp;
echo &quot;Copying : ${p}&quot; &amp;&amp;
cp &quot;${p}&quot; /media/extHDD/
done
}
</code></pre>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Using these functions together, I would use <code>l a</code> to list all the files
starting with a, then <code>add a_file_.mkv</code> to add it to the list to be processed.</p>
<p>Finally, use <code>upload</code> to have files pushed to the destination.</p>
<p>As you can see, none of these function are special or tricky, just simple little
hacks to reduce keystrokes and make a job easier.
I would say the main learning is, whatever you are doing use the tools to make
your life easier.</p>
<p>Tags: <a href='tag_bash.html'>bash</a>, <a href='tag_shells.html'>shells</a></p>
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