What's a handy terminal command you use often?

cybercitizen4@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 218 points –
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ls -al

I learned you can edit .bashrc (in your home dir) and update the alias for ls to include what I like. It has saved me lots of keystrokes. Mine is ls -lha in addition to whatever color coding stuff is there by default.

You might like eza even more!

Hmm, that's not working for me. You mean use those as options? 'ls -eza'?

No, it's like an ls replacement: https://github.com/eza-community/eza

Aha. Well, I guess I'm not the target audience because I can't be bothered to go through the installation steps. It's not in the LMDE repository, but I wish it were!

It's pretty easy. You either get it from Cargo (the Rust package manager) or add a custom repo to apt.

Cargo is the easier and safer option: curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh && cargo install eza

Custom apt repo:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y gpg

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eza-community/eza/main/deb.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/gierens.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/gierens.gpg] http://deb.gierens.de stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gierens.list
sudo chmod 644 /etc/apt/keyrings/gierens.gpg /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gierens.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y eza

In my opinion though, you should also try lsd. It's even better than eza. You can also get it from Cargo, just a simple cargo install lsd.

No, eza is one of those modern Rust replacement programs. It replaces ls.

There's a whole bunch of cool modern replacements. Here's a handy list: altbox.dev

I personally use bat and rg all the time, and find them much more suitable for everyday tasks.

Edit: And to clarify, I didn't create either list, they're just ones I'd bookmarked at some point.

A lot of distros include a .bashrc with common ls aliases commented out, just waiting for you to activate them if you like.

Another ls alias I'm a fan of is ls -latr which I alias to lt. It gives you a time sorted directory listing with the most recent next to your cursor (helpful for large directories).