One of the common annoyances of copy-pasting on Windows is that it tries to copy-paste the formatting as well. This issue can easily be fixed by the following AutoHotkey macro, which will copy the selection to the clipboard as pure text.
Tag: tips
Bash / zsh : Using the history expansion
One of the features of bash I’ve too long overlooked is its history expansion. In this post I’ll show a few examples to get a grip at it.
Continue reading Bash / zsh : Using the history expansion
shell tip : identify broken symlinks
If you need to identify broken symlinks, you can do the following :
find -L . -type l
The -L options instructs find to follow symlinks when possible. Hence no “working symlink” will ever get returned as the targets won’t match -type l (meaning “file is a symlink”).
On the other hand, find will not be able to follow broken symlinks, so the information will be taken from the symlink itself and not from the non-existent or otherwise unreachable target. The -type l will then be a match and the broken symlink filename will be returned.
Case solved 😉
Thanks to the “Ferg’s Gaff” blog (especially the comments) for showing the way !
Unix : shell tips
I ran into this into the following article, “Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits“. This article is mainly common sense, but there are interesting points, such as :
- avoid piping when you can, in order to save performance (the classical construct grep | wc to count the lines is useless as most versions of grep can count with grep -c)
- use awk to “grep” on a specific field of a line with “… | awk ‘$1 == “XXX”‘ which is cool and I never use
- the find | xargs construct (I’d add “find -print0 | xargs -0”, useful if your find brings back filenames with a space inside …)
All in all it is worth a reading, if only to refresh your memory.