How not to update every package in existence, break your local environment, and spend the afternoon dealing with things you did not want to deal with when installing a package with Homebrew

2023-12-18 #cli

Friendly reminder that you can disable Homebrew's default auto update behaviour with HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1.

HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew install git-secret

If you want to set and forget the setting, add it to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc.

export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1

Finding out which ports are in use

2021-07-09 #cli #unix-things-i-always-forget

Sometimes you want to spin up a process, but the port it wants to bind to is already in use. Or a port isn't listening to a process as you expected. lsof is a debugging life saver in these situations.

jq

2021-01-04 #cli #unix

I rediscovered jq the other day, a little command line tool to format, read, and transform JSON from the command line.

Jq falls into one of my favorite categories of tools: the "simple and do one thing good" category—the Unix philosophy at its finest.

Rsync

2020-07-15 #cli #unix-things-i-always-forget

Rsync is a command line tool to copy files between different hosts.

Zipping

2020-06-02 #cli #unix-things-i-always-forget

Zipping is easy. Remembering zip's arguments is hard.

Listing directories

2020-03-18 #cli #unix-things-i-always-forget

A listing of my favorite ls features.

Unix things I always forget

2020-03-18 #cli #unix-things-i-always-forget

A short intro on my second series: Unix things I always forget!

An attempt to document the Unix commands I know and care about. Consider this series a living document that will grow organically; I won't be updating or adding new posts on a set schedule.