I often want to know the status code of a curl request, but I don’t want that extra information to mess with the response body that it prints to stdout.

What to do?

Render an image instead, of course!

curlcat takes the same params as curl, but it uses iTerm2’s imgcat tool to draw an “HTTP Cat” of the status code.

It even sends the image to stderr instead of stdout, so you can still pipe curlcat to jq or something.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

stdoutfile=$( mktemp )
curl -sw "\n%{http_code}" $@ > $stdoutfile
exitcode=$?

if [[ $exitcode == 0 ]]; then
  statuscode=$( cat $stdoutfile | tail -1 )

  if [[ ! -f $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode ]]; then
    curl -so $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode https://http.cat/$statuscode
  fi

  imgcat $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode 1>&2
fi

cat $stdoutfile | ghead -n -1

exit $exitcode

Note: This is macOS-specific, as written, but as long as your terminal supports images, you should be able to adapt it just fine.

I wrote a script called please. You input please followed by any other command (e.g. please git clone, please wget blahblah) and a robotic voice will say “affirmative,” then the command will run, and when it completes, the robotic voice reads out the exit code (e.g. “completed successfully” or “failed with status 1” etc.)

This is useful for when you have a command that takes a long time and you want to be alerted when it’s finished. And it’s a gentleman.

alias clip='xclip -selection clipboard'

When you pipe to this, for example ls | clip, it will stick the output of the command ran into the clipboard without needing to manually copy the output.

on most of my systems I get tired of constantly lsing after a cd so I combine them:

cd(){
    cd $1 && ls
}

(excuse if this doesn’t work, I am writing this from memory)

I also wrote a function to access docker commands quicker on my Truenas system. If passed nothing, it enters the docker jailmaker system, else it passes the command to docker running inside the system.

docker () {
        if [[ "$1" == "" ]]; then
                jlmkr shell docker
                return
        else
                sudo systemd-run --pipe --machine docker docker "$@"
                return
        fi
}

I have a few similar shortcuts for programs inside jailmaker and long directories that I got sick of typing out.

I made this one to find binaries in NixOs and other systems

get_bin_path() {
        paths=${2:-$PATH}
        for dr in $(echo $paths | tr ':' '\n') ; do
                if [ -f "$dr/$1" ] ; then
                        echo "$dr/$1"
                        return 0
                fi
        done
        return 1
}

Then I made this one to, if I have a shell o opened inside neovim it will tell the neovim process running the shell to open a file on it, instead of starting a new process

_nvim_con() {
        abs_path=$(readlink --canonicalize "$@" | sed s'| |\\ |'g)
        $(get_bin_path nvim) --server $NVIM --remote-send "<ESC>:edit $abs_path<CR>"
        exit
}

# start host and open file
_nvim_srv() {
        $(get_bin_path nvim) --listen $HOME/.cache/nvim/$$-server.pipe $@
}

if [ -n "$NVIM" ] ; then
        export EDITOR="_nvim_con"
else
        export EDITOR="_nvim_srv"
fi

Lastly this bit: which if it detects a file and a line number split by a : it will open the file and jump to the line

_open() {
        path_parts=$(readlink --canonicalize "$@" | sed s'| |\\ |'g | sed 's/:/\t/' )
        file=$(echo "$path_parts" | awk ' { print $1 }' )
        line=$(echo "$path_parts" | awk ' { print $2 }' )

        if [ -n "$line" ] ; then
                # has line number
                if [ -n "$NVIM" ] ; then
                        $(get_bin_path nvim) --server $NVIM --remote-send "<ESC>:edit $file<CR>:+$line<CR>"
                        exit
                else
                        $(get_bin_path nvim) --listen $HOME/.cache/nvim/$$-server.pipe $file "+:$line"
                fi
        else
                $EDITOR $file
        fi
}

alias nvim="_open"

all of my bash config is here

Here are probably the most useful ones. I prefer for rm to be interactive so I don’t accidentally delete something important and for mkdir to create a parent directory if necessary.

alias rm='rm -i'
alias mkdir='mkdir -p'
alias podup='podman-compose down && podman-compose pull && podman-compose up -d'

This extract function (which I didn’t make myself, I got it from when I was using nakeDeb) has been pretty useful too.

function extract()
{
     if [ -f $1 ] ; then
         case $1 in
             *.tar.bz2)   tar xvjf $1     ;;
             *.tar.gz)    tar xvzf $1     ;;
             *.bz2)       bunzip2 $1      ;;
             *.rar)       unrar x $1      ;;
             *.gz)        gunzip $1       ;;
             *.tar)       tar xvf $1      ;;
             *.tbz2)      tar xvjf $1     ;;
             *.tgz)       tar xvzf $1     ;;
             *.zip)       unzip $1        ;;
             *.Z)         uncompress $1   ;;
             *.7z)        7z x $1         ;;
             *.xz)        unxz $1         ;;
             *)           echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via >extract<" ;;
         esac
     else
         echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
     fi
}

alias qr='qrencode -t ansiutf8'

This makes qr codes in the terminal.

needs the qrencode package

Example usage and output:

felix@buttsexmachine:~$ qr lemmy.fish
█████████████████████████████
█████████████████████████████
████ ▄▄▄▄▄ █▄ ██ █ ▄▄▄▄▄ ████
████ █   █ █ █▄▀▄█ █   █ ████
████ █▄▄▄█ █▄▄▄███ █▄▄▄█ ████
████▄▄▄▄▄▄▄█▄▀ █▄█▄▄▄▄▄▄▄████
████▄▄▄ █▀▄▀▄▀ █▀▄▀▀   █ ████
████▄ ▀▄▀▄▄ ▀▄▄█ ▄▄▄█▀█ ▄████
██████▄███▄█▀█ ▄█▄ █▀█▀▄▄████
████ ▄▄▄▄▄ ██ ▀▀▀▀▄   ▀█▀████
████ █   █ █▀ ▀▄█▀▀▄▄  ▀█████
████ █▄▄▄█ █ ▀█ ▀█▀ █▄▄█▀████
████▄▄▄▄▄▄▄█▄▄█▄▄▄███▄▄██████
█████████████████████████████
█████████████████████████████
```*___*

alias sl=“ls“

here we go:

dedup:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
!x[$0]++

this removes duplicate lines, preserving line order

iter:

#!/usr/bin/bash
if [[ "${@}" =~ /$ ]]; then
    xargs -rd '\n' -I {} "${@}"{}
else
    xargs -rd '\n' -I {} "${@}" {}
fi

This executes a command for each line. It can also be used to compare two directories, ie:

du -sh * > sizes; ls | iter du -sh ../kittens/ > sizes2

fadeout:

#!/bin/bash
# I use this to fade out layered brown noise that I play at a volume of 130%
# This takes about 2 minutes to run, and the volume is at zero several seconds before it's done.
# ################
# DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is needed so that playerctl can find the dbus to use MPRIS so it can control mpv
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus"
# ################
for i in {130..0}
do
    volume=$(echo "scale=3;$i/100" | bc)
    sleep 2.3
    playerctl --player=mpv volume $volume
done

lbn:

#!/bin/bash
#lbn_pid=$(cat ~/.local/state/lbn.pid)
if pgrep -fl layered_brown
then
	pkill -f layered_brown
else
	export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus"
	mpv -ao pulse ~/layered_brown_noise.mp3 >>lbn.log 2>&1 &
	sleep 3
	playerctl -p mpv volume 1.3 >>lbn.log 2>&1 &
fi

This plays “layered brown noise” by crysknife. It’s a great sleep aid.

here are some aliases:

alias m='mpc random off; mpc clear'
alias mpcc='ncmpcpp'
alias thesaurus='dict -d moby-thesaurus'
alias wtf='dict -d vera'
alias tvplayer='mpv -fs --geometry=768x1366+1366+0'

git() {
  if [ "$1" = "cd" ]; then
    shift
    cd "./$(command git rev-parse --show-cdup)$*"
  else
    command git "$@"
  fi
}

This lets you run git cd to go to the root of your repo, or git cd foo/bar to go to a path relative to that root. You can’t do it as an alias because it’s conditional, and you can’t do it as a git-cd command because that wouldn’t affect the current shell.

#Create a dir and cd into it
mkcd() { mkdir -p "$@" && cd "$@"; }

function seesv
    column -s, -t < $argv[1] | less -#2 -N -S
end

I used this a lot when I had to deal with CSV files — it simply shows the data in a nice format. It’s an alias for the fish shell by the way.

To save videos from certain streaming sites that are not supported by yt-dlp, I catch the M3U playlist used by the page and with that I use this script that gets ffmpeg to put together the pieces into a single file.

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" == "-h" ] || [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
	echo Download a video from a playlist into a single file
	echo usage: $(basename $0) PLAYLIST OUTPUT_VID
	exit
fi

nbparts=$(grep ^[^#] $1 | wc -l)

echo -e "\e[38;5;202m Downloading" $(( nbparts - 1 )) "parts \e[00m"
time ffmpeg -hide_banner -allowed_extensions ALL -protocol_whitelist file,http,https,tcp,tls,crypto -i $1 -codec copy $2

Since 720p downloading isn’t really available on yt-dlp anymore, I made an alias for it

alias yt720p="yt-dlp -S vcodec:h264,fps,res:720,acodec:m4a"

One of favorites cds to the root of a project directory from a subdirectory,

# Changes to top-level directory of git repository.
alias gtop="cd \$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"