Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

> trash a.txt b.png moves `a.txt` and `b.png` to the trash. Supports macOS and Linux.

The way you’re doing it trashes files sequentially, meaning you hear the trashing sound once per file and ⌘Z in the Finder will only restore the last one. You can improve that (I did it for years) but consider just using the `trash` commands which ships with macOS. Doesn’t use the Finder, so no sound and no ⌘Z, but it’s fast, official, and still allows “Put Back”.

> jsonformat takes JSON at stdin and pretty-prints it to stdout.

Why prioritise node instead of jq? The latter is considerably less code and even comes preinstalled with macOS, now.

> uuid prints a v4 UUID. I use this about once a month.

Any reason to not simply use `uuidgen`, which ships with macOS and likely your Linux distro?

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/uuidgen.1.html

It's weird how the circle of life progresses for a developer or whatever.

- When I was a fresh engineer I used a pretty vanilla shell environment

- When I got a year or two of experience, I wrote tons of scripts and bash aliases and had a 1k+ line .bashrc the same as OP

- Now, as a more tenured engineer (15 years of experience), I basically just want a vanilla shell with zero distractions, aliases or scripts and use native UNIX implementations. If it's more complicated than that, I'll code it in Python or Go.

This is one area that I've found success in vibe coding with. Making scripts for repetitive tasks that are just above the complexity threshold where the math between automating and doing manually is not so clear. I have copilot generate the code for me and honestly I don't care too much of its quality, extensibility, and are easy enough to read through where I don't feel like my job is AI pr reviewer.

Regarding the `line` script, just a note that sed can print an arbitrary line from a file, no need to invoke a pipeline of cat, head, and tail:

    sed -n 2p file

    sed -n 2,4p file

This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm most interested in finding on HN. How do other developers work, and how can I get better at my work from it?

What's always interesting to me is how many of these I'll see and initially think, "I don't really need that." Because I'm well aware of the effect (which I'm sure has a name - I suppose it's similar to induced demand) of "make $uncommon_task much cheaper" -> "$uncommon_task becomes the basis of an entirely new workflow/skill". So I'm going to try out most of them and see what sticks!

Also: really love the style of the post. It's very clear but also includes super valuable information about how often the author actually uses each script, to get a sense ahead of time for which ones are more likely to trigger the effect described above.

A final aside about my own workflows which betrays my origins... for some of these operations and for others i occasionally need, I'll just open a browser dev tools window and use JS to do it, for example lowercasing a string :)

I keep meaning to generalize this (directory target, multiple sources, flags), but I get quite a bit of mileage out of this `unmv` script even as it is:

  #!/bin/sh
  if test "$#" != 2
  then
      echo 'Error: unmv must have exactly 2 arguments'
      exit 1
  fi
  exec mv "$2" "$1"

I have mkcd exactly ( I wonder how many of us do, it's so obvious)

I have almost the same, but differently named with scratch(day), copy(xc), markdown quote(blockquote), murder, waitfor, tryna, etc.

I used to use telegram-send with a custom notification sounnd a lot for notifications from long-running scripts if I walked away from the laptop.

I used to have one called timespeak that would speak the time to me every hour or half hour.

I have go_clone that clones a repo into GOPATH which I use for organising even non-go projects long after putting go projects in GOPATH stopped being needed.

I liked writing one-offs, and I don't think it's premature optimization because I kept getting faster at it.

I have a bunch of little scripts and aliases I've written over the years, but none are used more than these...

alias ..='cd ..'

alias ...='cd ../..'

alias ....='cd ../../..'

alias .....='cd ../../../..'

alias ......='cd ../../../../..'

alias .......='cd ../../../../../..'

Some cool things here but in general I like to learn and use the standard utilities for most of this. Main reason is I hop in and out of a lot of different systems and my personal aliases and scripts are not on most of them.

sed, awk, grep, and xargs along with standard utilities get you a long long way.

> alphabet just prints the English alphabet in upper and lowercase. I use this surprisingly often (probably about once a month)

I genuinely wonder, why would anyone want to use this, often?

> `rn` prints the current time and date using date and cal.

And you can type `rn -rf *` to see all timezones recursively. :)

> cpwd copies the current directory to the clipboard. Basically pwd | copy. I often use this when I’m in a directory and I want use that directory in another terminal tab; I copy it in one tab and cd to it in another. I use this once a day or so.

You can configure your shell to notify the terminal of directory changes, and then use your terminal’s “open new window” function (eg: ctrl+shift+n) to open a new window retaining the current directory.