Command line tools every web dev needs to know

[zalew]

quite relevant: http://www.commandlinefu.com a great collection of cli uses and abuses

one of my favorites is querying dns to get wiki excerpts

    dig +short txt bmw.wp.dg.cx
    "(BMW), is an independent German automobile manufacturing company founded in 1916. It also produces motorcycles, is the owner of the MINI brand and is the parent company of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW"

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2829/query-wikipe...

[morsch]

I've got something like this in my .bashrc so I can access commandlinefu from within the shell:

  cmdfu(){ wget -qO - "http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/$@/$(echo -n "$@" | openssl base64)/plaintext"; }

It's like man but for one-liners.

[benjaminwootton]

We are interviewing for experienced developers at the moment and the lack of general unix knowledge is really surprising.

A little bit of shell scripting goes a long way in automating away dev work.

[Derbasti]

Also, typing.

I am frequently amazed to see professional software developers with years of experience in the field, who only type using their two index fingers. You probably do not need to type 120 WPM to be an amazing programmer, but typing without looking at the keyboard is absolutely essential.

[zobzu]

I agree whole-fully. I know many "experts" in various areas such as programming, web dev, security, and a few others.

Rare are the ones who know how to use these basic commandline tools.

The last time I've shown ngrep to a sysadmin he was like "omagad amazing" - always feels nice :)

But, that's not really an obscure tool. I initially thought everyone knew that, like most know nmap.

Turns out most know nmap and ssh because they're really that well known (generally they don't know most options)

Makes me sad! Command's line easy and fun!

[lordlarm]

Another useful one; Fire up a instant web-server from local folder on http://localhost:8080:

> python -m SimpleHTTPServer

[dudus]

Note that it has changed in python3

  > python3 -m http.server
  Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ...

  > python3 -m http.server 8080
  Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080 ...

[bgaluszka]

Or if you use php (5.4 needed)

> php -S localhost:8080

[axitanull]

Also in case you need to use another port (such as 5000):

> python -m SimpleHTTPServer 5000

[agumonkey]

smtp server one liner :

    $ sudo python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25

[simfoo]

> With the following command we test google with 20 concurrent connections for 30 seconds

Even though this is Google and they probably don't have a problem with this, I don't think you should benchmark servers that don't belong to you. It's not nice and could be mistaken for a DOS attack.

[ihsw]

Google may actually give you a short-term IP ban (a day or so), so spamming their servers with spurious connections may not be in your best interest -- doubly so if you're at a workplace.

[jameswyse]

Also check out HTTPie: https://github.com/jkbr/httpie/ I much prefer it over curl.

$ http GET http://yourmom.ca/

[secoif]

see also burl: https://github.com/visionmedia/burl been good for testing requests against json apis

[apawloski]

What's the advatage of HTTPie? Friendlier syntax?

[lovskogen]

Yesterday I used the ipfw command to run our product in "slow motion" to spot loading order and if animations started at the right places. Discovered alot of stuff that needs fixing. The ipfw command is for trottling bandwidth, and great for product designers like myself :) I'm sure it has other uses as well.

[rada]

OS X has a useful Network Link Conditioner utility. It has built-in profiles such as lossy 3G connection, average wifi connection, good wifi connection etc.

[sirn]

    $ curl -I news.ycombinator.com
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Cache-Control: private
    Connection: close

Keep in mind that this will fire a HEAD request to the server which, depending on web server you use in development, may not return the exact header you'd get with GET (IIRC, Jetty used to do this).

I like to use something like this in such situation:

    $ curl -s -D /dev/stderr news.ycombinator.com >/dev/null

[k33l0r]

You can also use the -i option which prints out the headers and the response body (which is perhaps a bit too noisy).

    curl -i http://news.ycombinator.com

[ralph]

I rarely find I use curl's -s without its -S, e.g. -sS. It seems curl's design is flawed in its definition of -s; perhaps it's historic and it was too late to change it.

[jasomill]

Among (too) many other things, the OpenSSL "openssl" command does Base64 en/decoding, calculates MD5 and SHA* hashes, creates, displays, converts, and verifies certificates, certificate chains, and CRLs, and even works as a convenient "micro-CA" for testing purposes.

[coderholic]

I'm honoured that this post has made it to the front page a second time! Here are the comments from the first time around: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2880800

[bazzargh]

That ngrep tool is pretty nifty. Has anyone done something like that with dtrace? (I know about tcpsnoop - something at a higher level)

[jessicard]

If you're getting started with the command line, you might find helpful an entire series on Quick Left's blog for beginners and experienced devs alike: http://quickleft.com/blog/tag/command-line

[ibotty]

swaks is another very nice tool for email-testing (isn't email also part of the web nowadays)

[moreati]

Cheers for that, will come in handy very soon. For those wondering

Deliver a standard test email, requiring CRAM-MD5 authentication as user [email protected]. An "X-Test" header will be added to the email body. The authentication password will be prompted for.

  swaks --to [email protected] --from [email protected] --auth CRAM-MD5 --auth-user [email protected] --header-X-Test "test email"

http://linux.die.net/man/1/swaks

[justincormack]

Being able to use DNS tools is a requirement too.

[patrickod]

Another alternative to ifconfig.me is icanhazip.com The main difference being that icanhazip.com supports ipv6.

[kooshball]

if you use json a lot, this is super useful for prettifying stuff in command line.

echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | python -mjson.tool

[easternmonk]

ant ?

[fsaintjacques]

why?