As a Linux enthusiast, I often find that there is just so much to learn that it can get overwhelming. The keyboard is by far still the fastest way to interact with a computer, but memorizing all of the shortcuts can be daunting.

When I was getting the hang of emacs, I thought it would be good to read a book to try and improve my skills. I quickly realized though that I was getting too much information at once to make it useful. My cap seems to be two or three new shortcuts or commands per day that I will be able to make use of on a regular basis.

I think that is generally applicable to all people. Learning one or two new commands is certainly feasible, as long as it’s a command you will be able to use regularly. In that same vien, I was recently directed to the website commandlinefu.com during a discussion at my local Linux users group.

This is a great place to get all kinds of amazing new commands. I’ve found that if you sort them by popularity, you either know them or they are so awesome you want to try them out immediately. There is still that pesky matter of recalling them when you actually would benefit from having them.

To that end, I decided to make aliases for them. That way, all of my favorite commands would be in my .bash_aliases file and I could have an easy place to look them up. Many of them have command line parameters though which aliases don’t normally accept. There is a way around this though. You can alias a bash function. So, for example, if you’d like to alias the remote diff, you’d probably want the server and the two files to be defined at the command line. In your .bash_aliases file, you can do something like this:

remote_diff()  
{  
     ssh $1 cat $2 | diff $3 -  
}  

alias rdiff=remote_diff  

Then the rdiff command could be executed like:

rdiff user@host /some/remote/file /some/local/file