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Change directories faster with zsh

Brian St. Pierre — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:23:44 +0000

Something I didn’t know until recently:

zsh does not require cd to change directories.

Using the directory as a command implies “cd”. For example, instead of doing:

me@server:/home/me $ cd /tmp
me@server:/tmp $

You can just do:

me@server:/home/me $ /tmp
me@server:/tmp $

That’s three whole keystrokes (nearly half the command shown above), all day long.

Hassle Free Way to Kill Sudo’d Jobs

Brian St. Pierre — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:45:28 +0000

Every now and then I have to run a foreground job under sudo that doesn’t want to die when I hit ^C. Then it’s a hassle to ^Z, get the pid of the sudo job, and sudo kill that pid.

So I wrote a little script (or a template for scripts) that runs the sudo job in the background (but preserves stdout/stderr) and relies on bash to clean up the job when you ^C the script. Only gotcha with this is that you may have to retype your sudo password when you ^C if your authentication has timed out by the time you get around to killing it.

#!/bin/bash

function cleanup()
{
    sudo kill $job_pid
    wait $job_pid
    exit 0
}

trap cleanup SIGTERM
trap cleanup SIGINT

sudo long_running_foreground_process &
job_pid=$!
wait

Firefox Quick Search for Google Maps

Brian St. Pierre — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:43:19 +0000

I recently found myself wanting to quickly figure out how far (both miles and driving time) it is to various destinations. At first I was keeping a Firefox tab open to Google Maps and kept keying in the address for the destination. Then I realized that I could make a “Quick Search” and get the info faster. Add this link to your Quick Searches folder:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=Elm+St,+ Manchester,+NH+03101&daddr=%s&output=html

[Formatted here for readability. Put it all on one line with no spaces.]

Edit the properties so that the “saddr=” part is your start address. Change the keyword to “gm”. This is set to only output simple HTML (no map). If you want the full map, remove the &output=html on the end.

Now, when you need to get a quick idea of how long it is going to take you to get somewhere, open a new tab and type “gm city, state”.