I have found myself using these commands over and over so I decided I’d take the time to go ahead and document them for future me as well as readers because I find these commands pretty useful. I just always manage to forget them, hence the title of the post. The smart thing to do would be to create aliases for these commands but I have just been too lazy and some of them are run across different servers so it isn’t always a convenient option.
Anyway, let’s go ahead and run through the commands before I forget…
1) du -ah / | sort -n -r | head -n 50
This one is really handy for debugging space issues. It will list the top 50 files according to file size, with the largest at the top of the list.Notice the “/” will specify the location to search so you can easily modify this one to search different locations, like “/var/log” for example if you are having trouble with growing log files.
1.5) du -sh /*
This will quickly give you an idea of how how your disk space has been allocated. Definitely handy when you are troubleshooting.
2) git checkout — .
I don’t use this one very often, which is probably why I manage to forget it so easily. But I really like it. Sometimes I will be working on a git repo across different machines at the same time and will run in to conflicts committing to the repo or more likely I committed changes on one machine and just need to pull down the newest changes but can’t since I have made modifications. For those scenarios you can run the above command quickly reset your git changes quickly and easily.
3) tmux kill-window -t 3
i use tmux for my terminal and window manager on all my workstations and love it. If you haven’t heard of it, take a look here. Sometimes the sessions can get stuck so it becomes necessary to close the window without destroying the tmux session. Again, this doesn’t happen very often so it is sometimes hard for me to remember the exact syntax but this one is a handy little trick for managing tmux windows and sessions.
4) grep -r “text”
I know, I should really have this one memorized by now. I am trying to remember but I don’t find myself using this one all that often even though it is really powerful and useful. This will essentially search through every file recursively and spit out the text pattern that you feed to it.
5) kill $(pgrep process)
This one is handy when there are a large number of stuck processes and you need to blow them all out with one command. For example if the chrome browser ever gets stuck with a million tabs open, there are likely a large number of processes all with the same – or similar names. If you pass all or part of the process name in to this command pgrep will find them and kill will destroy them
6) docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)
I have been using Docker more and more recently and every once in awhile I find myself with a large number of dead Docker processes that need to be cleaned up. This command will blow out all of these stale processes at once. This is nice because Docker processes take up a large amount of disk space and often times can fill up your drives without you being aware. I have been able to reclaim large amounts of disk space with this command.
7) watch -n 10 df -ah
This is another good one for checking disk space issues. It will update you every ten seconds with the disk utilization of the system. Pretty straight forward but a great tool to help troubleshooting space issues.
That’s all I have for now, there are lots more but these are the most useful ones that I find myself forgetting the most often, hopefully this post will serve as a nice reminder. If you have any cool or useful commands that you would like to share feel free to comment and I will update the post to include them.
