Infamous internet user Mike Hoye had an excellent prompt question and it got me thinking about the bash functions I use the most. There are three file and directory functions that live in my ~/.bash_functions file and a helper function I’m documenting here for myself and others.
mkcdThis simply create a directory and cds into it. Nothing fancy but I use it all the time. Maybe I could put error handling in here but I’ve never needed it so far and I’ve been using this function for years.
mkcd ()
{
mkdir -p "$@" && cd "$@" || exit;
}
dlhereI created this two years ago and only recently turned it into a function. It moves files that have been downloaded in the last 60 minutes to the current directory. I used it all the time by calling from thy
function dlhere()
{
find "$HOME"/Downloads -cmin -60 -type f -exec mv {} ./ \;;
}
dspacedspace is the most recent function I wrote and something of a companion to dlhere because I often end up downloading with files with spaces and it’s a pain to manually rename them. I do use the ask function to confirm the rename. I like the confirmation and I will probably use it again. I might also extend the function to allow a custom replacement character, but maybe not. This works pretty well for me.
function dspace()
{ # replace spaces in a filename with underscores
despaced=$(echo "$1" | sed 's/ /_/g')
if ask "\nRename $1 to $despaced?";
then mv "$1" "$despaced";
fi
}
askThe ask function is a helper function that I found somewhere back in the days before people putting their dotfiles on github and instead put them on their university web pages. It’s a simple function that wraps bash read and gives a nice clean return value and looks nice when you use it in a function.
function ask()
{
echo -n "$@" '[y/n] ' ; read -r ans
case "$ans" in
y*|Y*) return 0 ;;
*) return 1 ;;
esac
}