Best practices for navigating file structure via terminal?

@Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml · edit-2 2Y

Best practices for navigating file structure via terminal?

@underisk@lemmy.ml · 2Y

Look into your shell’s tab completion abilities, the find command, and fzf. There’s also stuff like midnight commander but I find that to be a little overkill for my tastes.

@jernej@lemmy.ml · 2Y

I use ls and ranger, to find files i use find -name and remember that * is used as a wildcard so you can use it when searching for stuff with in incomplete filename or when copying or moving files/directories. You could also use colorls to add some flare to your ls, and oh-my-zsh for syntax highlighting and tab autocomplete

palordrolap · 2Y

Depending on system, something like locate/mlocate might be installed, and is almost certainly available if the following seems like a good idea.

Tools/daemons like them are quicker for finding files - basically because they index all files except those in specified places. (Or potentially only those in specified places depending on tool/configuration.)

That way, rather than find -name 'some_wildcard_string', it’s instead locate 'partial_filename_match or locate --regex 'some_regex_string'.

As for speed: locate / | wc -c returned 565035, the count of files currently indexed by mlocate on my computer, in 0.3 seconds. Quite a bit quicker than find! (locate / literally returns any file with a / in the full pathname, which basically means every single file in its DB).

@nathris@lemmy.ca · 2Y

I know there is probably a historical reason but I hate how find parses its arguments.

Any other app would be fine --name or find -n.

Every time I use it I have to spend a few minutes checking the results to make sure that it’s actually doing what I want it to do.

@BaumGeist@lemmy.ml · 2Y

Also every other search program has the needle as a positional argument and either reserves a named parameter to specify haystack, or has the haystack come after.

Apparently the find devs thought users would spend more time using it as an alternative to ls -a than finding specific files

HoldMyType- main :: [Response] · 2Y

@BaumGeist @nathris try zsh plugins/ widgets in term, that helped me

@bellsDoSing@lemm.ee · edit-2 2Y

That’s one of the reasons why the more modern fd is a nice alternative: it accepts command line args as you’d expect.

@bdonvr@thelemmy.club · 2Y

Not strictly file browsing advice, but you can quickly search for previously issued commands by hitting ctrl-r and starting to type. (and you can press it again to search further back)

@Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml · 2Y

Damn, that is incredibly useful. Thanks!

@Gryzor@lemmyfly.org · 2Y

Also check https://github.com/junegunn/fzf and https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

Two great utilities that will reduce the number of file jumping and searching you need to do. :)

More useful tools: https://zaiste.net/posts/shell-commands-rust/

@SandySocks@lemmy.world · 2Y

Can’t believe I’ve never heard of this before, thanks for the tip!

@bdonvr@thelemmy.club · 2Y

Another person saved from hitting up 50 times

@icdl@lemm.ee · 2Y

Not to be “that guy”, but you can use a gui file manager to access your files the same way you do so in windows. Most of them support ssh keys as well. If you’d like to check out the cli stuff, nnn or ranger can be useful. Something like midnight as abckup is good too. Definitely install fzf on both your vps and local machine. You can also go over board and run xorg over ssh and run a small window manager, maybe awesomewm or even xfce (not that small but works fine).

@Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml · 2Y

I was speaking more towards my VPS , which of course has no OS GUI. In Unraid I do use the very nice GUI regularly though.

nlm · 2Y

Midnight commander is a pretty nice alternative!

@dizzy@lemmy.ml · 2Y

There are tools like sshfs that let you mount remote directories as if they’re local. Most of the time I tend to use nnn with some of the little extra bits you can find in the docs like cd to last directory on quit and multi-colored tabs etc.

Presi300 · 2Y

Use the fish shell… No, seriously it’s autocomplete and tab functionality makes browsing directories through the terminal so much easier

@Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml · 2Y

lol, their website is delightfully retro. Only thing missing is a random GIF that has no context, just there to grab attention. https://fishshell.com/

lemmyvore · edit-2 2Y

Something I haven’t seen mentioned here is Ctrl + R on the command line to quick-search history. You start typing/backspacing and it shows the most recent matching history entry. Press Ctrl + R or Ctrl + Shift + R to navigate up and down through matching entries. Press Enter to pick an entry, Ctrl + C to cancel.

@Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml · 2Y

I saw that mentioned in another comment and I’ve been testing it out while I try to get Cryptpad installed on my VPS and its very nice!

Undearius · 2Y

You can also make this the default behaviour as you start typing a command.

Create ~/.inputrc and add these lines:

$include /etc/inputrc

## arrow up
"\e[A":history-search-backward
## arrow down
"\e[B":history-search-forward```

@CoderKat@lemm.ee · 2Y

Also, if OP is new, they may not yet be aware of aliases and functions. Generally you’d out those in a ~/.bashrc file that gets automatically executed when a terminal starts. They’ll allow you to save a more complex command as a really simple one. And particularly can be useful when things you want to run are in unusual directories. Eg, maybe you have a git repo somewhere that contains some project you spend most of your time on, so you could have an alias that just cd’s you to it’s directory. Git also has its own way of doing aliases and that’s really nifty for the more complicated git commands (or the more commonly used, like st for status).

@RovingFox@infosec.pub · 2Y

Depends on your workflow and file structure, but nvim with nvchad works great for coding. I also sometimes use ranger to better see file structures.

Kool_Newt · 2Y

Learn to use pushd and popd

@SnachBarr@lemm.ee · 2Y

Why use a separate command when “cd -“ works just fine to take you to the previous directory

@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz · 2Y

cd a
cd b
cd c
popd
popd
// you're now in "a"

cd a
cd b
cd c
cd -
cd -
// you're now in "c" and need to manually cd to "a"

z3bra · 2Y

You mean

cd a
pushd b
pushed c
popd
popd

Right ?

Depending on your shell, pushd/popd might not be an option. For a similar functionality, I like to use a subshell which is portable across all shells:

cd a
$SHELL
cd b
cd c
# do work here
^D
# you're back in "a"

@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz · 2Y

Ah, I guess I have auto_pushd enabled in zsh, so it just happens when I cd. TIL.

@SnachBarr@lemm.ee · 2Y

Neat, thanks

Kool_Newt · 2Y

Right, but what if the dir you want to return to was not the last one?

For example, you are working in two dirs and go into your home dir for something, now you can pop yourself back into your long ass hard to type working path.

@orizuru@lemmy.sdf.org · 2Y

ls / cd for basic stuff
fzf if I want to find my way through the history
broot if I want to search for a file
ripgrep if I want to find a file with specific contents.

I know that the last 3 are not available by default, but they are good pieces of software, so I’m just going to install them.

@somedaysoon@lemmy.world · edit-2 2Y

You might already know, but fzf does a lot more than just history. You can also use it to find files, open files, and cd into different directories and more.

I’ve never heard of broot but it looks cool and I’m about to check it out right now.

@ErnieBernie10@lemmy.world · 2Y

Useful one I find is the z program you can install it with package manager and it’s also included with zsh shell. It’s basically like a smart cd command. Instead of having to type the entire path for cd, when using z you can just type the destination folder and if it’s in your history it will resolve the path by itself.

buckykat [none/use name] · 2Y

cd, ls, and the tab key are the basic tools of terminal filesystem navigation

@exylos@jlai.lu · 2Y

To navigate quickly between directories in ssh, I recommend you using zoxide as cd replacement.

Zoxide remembers the directories you visited, then you can jump to them very quickly.

@Rescuer6394@feddit.nl · 2Y

i have broot, an interactive tree

bahmanm · 2Y

That’s a good question 💯 In my case too, it took me some time (read years 😂) to figure out what I’m comfortable w/.

I can think of 3 major ways that you can navigate the filesystem while being able to drop to a shell when you need it:

If you’re familiar w/ Emacs, you can either:
- Use dired and tramp on your machine to access/navigate the target machine.
- Install Emacs (emacs-nox) on the target machine, SSH and then run emacs-nox and voila! No need for tramp in this scenario.
Use Midnight Commander (mc) which offers a TUI pretty much like Norton Commander (nc) from the days of yore.
Get used to the semi-standard structure of the file system and just use plain Bash (cd, pushd & popd) to move around. That is
- Understand what usually goes into common directories (like /usr/share or /opt) and try to follow the same pattern when rolling your own software installations.
- Learn how to use your distro’s package manager to query packages and find out where things, like configurations and docs, are stored. Something as simple as rpm -q --list is what you usually need.

HTH

@indigomirage@lemmy.ca · 2Y

Old school, but I really like midnight commander or mc. Fast and easy.

Another good one is ranger - more concise, but great.

tongri · 2Y

@indigomirage @Father_Redbeard
I used mc 20 years or so ago. Now I use nnn.

bayaz · 2Y

I love ranger. Mostly I just use the basic shell, but when I’m doing a lot of random file transfer, seeing what I’m doing with ranger is nice.

It’s super fast and intuitive if you’re already into vim and vim-style keybindings.