Infamous internet user Mike Hoye had an excellent prompt question and it got me thinking about the bash functions I use the most. Here 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.
Another purpose of writing this up is to think about how I use the system and how I create functions. I think for the longest time I would try to build out every use I could think of but would get hung up in details and when I did finish in general I’d use one. I changed my thinking around this and do quick hits that fill the one need right away and iterate around that if needed. Often it’s not, or if a change is needed it’s something I think of after years of using that tool and sometimes after work habits have changed. These functions are not the most complete, but they’re very useful ones written around this way of thinking.
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 worked out this command 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 the
function dlhere()
{
find "$HOME"/Downloads -cmin -60 -type f -exec mv {} ./ \;;
}
dspacedspace is the most recent function I wrote and something of a companion to dlhere because I often end up downloading with files with spaces and it’s a pain to manually rename them. I do use the ask function to confirm the rename. I like the confirmation and I will probably use it again. I might also extend the function to allow a custom replacement character, but maybe not. This works pretty well for me as is.
function dspace()
{ # replace spaces in a filename with underscores
despaced=$(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
}