Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

In my decade-plus of maintaining my dotfiles, I’ve written a lot of little shell scripts. Here’s a big list of my personal favorites. Clipboard copy and pasta are simple wrappers around system clipboard managers, like pbcopy on macOS and xclip on Linux. I use these all the time. # High level examples run_some_command | copy pasta > file_from_my_clipboard.txt # Copy a file's contents copy < file.txt # Open a file path from your clipboard vim " $( pasta ) " # Decode some base64 from the clipboard pasta | base64 --decode pastas prints the current state of your clipboard to stdout, and then whenever the clipboard changes, it prints the new version. I use this once a week or so. # High level example pastas > everything_i_copied.txt # Download every link I copy to my clipboard pastas | wget -i - cpwd copies the current directory to the clipboard. Basically pwd | copy . I often use this when I’m in a directory and I want use that directory in another terminal tab; I copy it in one tab and cd to it in another. I use this once a day or so. File management mkcd foo makes a directory and cd s inside. It’s basically mkdir foo && cd foo . I use this all the time—almost every time I make a directory, I want to go in there. tempe changes to a temporary directory. It’s basically cd "$(mktemp -d)" . I use this all the time to hop into a sandbox directory. It saves me from having to manually clean up my work. A couple of common examples: # Download a file and extract it tempe wget 'https://example.com/big_file.tar.xz' tar -xf big_file.tar.xz # ...do something with the file... # Write a quick throwaway script to try something out tempe vim foo.py python3 foo.py trash a.txt b.png moves a.txt and b.png to the trash. Supports macOS and Linux. I use this every day. I definitely run it more than rm , and it saves me from accidentally deleting files. mksh makes it quick to create shell scripts. mksh foo.sh creates foo.sh , makes it executable with chmod u+x , adds some nice Bash prefixes, and opens it with my editor (Vim in my case). I use this every few days. Many of the scripts in this post were made with this helper! Internet serveit starts a static file server on localhost:8000 in the current directory. It’s basically python3 -m http.server 8000 but handles cases where Python isn’t installed, falling back to other programs. I use this a few times a week. Probably less useful if you’re not a web developer. getsong uses yt-dlp to download songs, often from YouTube or SoundCloud, in the highest available quality. For example, getsong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ downloads that video as a song. I use this a few times a week…typically to grab video game soundtracks… getpod similarly uses yt-dlp to download something for a podcast player. There are a lot of videos that I’d rather listen to like a podcast. I use this a few times a month. getsubs downloads the English subtitles for a video. (There’s some fanciness to look for “official” subtitles, falling back to auto-generated subtitles.) Sometimes I read the subtitles manually, sometimes I run getsubs https://video.example/foo | ollama run llama3.2 "Summarize this" , sometimes I just want it as a backup of a video I don’t want to save on my computer. I use this every few days. wifi off , wifi on , and wifi toggle are useful for controlling my system’s wifi. wifi toggle is the one I use most often, when I’m having network trouble. I use this about once a month. url "$my_url" parses a URL into its parts. I use this about once a month to pull data out of a URL, often because I don’t want to click a nasty tracking link. url 'https://evil.example/track-user-link?url=https%3A%2F%2Furl-i-want-to-visit.example&track=06f8582a-91e6-4c9c-bf8e-516884584aba#cookie=123' # original: https://evil.example/track-user-link?url=https%3A%2F%2Furl-i-want-to-visit.example&track=06f8582a-91e6-4c9c-bf8e-516884584aba#cookie=123 # protocol: https # hostname: evil.example # path: /track-user-link # query: url=https%3A%2F%2Furl-i-want-to-visit.example&track=06f8582a-91e6-4c9c-bf8e-516884584aba # - url https://url-i-want-to-visit.example # - track 06f8582a-91e6-4c9c-bf8e-516884584aba # hash: cookie=123 Text processing line 10 prints line 10 from stdin. For example, cat some_big_file | line 10 prints line 10 of a file. This feels like one of those things that should be built in, like head and tail . I use this about once a month. scratch opens a temporary Vim buffer. It’s basically an alias for $EDITOR $(mktemp) . I use this about once a day for quick text manipulation tasks, or to take a little throwaway note. straightquote converts “smart quotes” to “straight quotes” (sometimes called “dumb quotes”). I don’t care much about these in general, but they sometimes weasel their way into code I’m working on. It can also make the file size smaller, which is occasionally useful. I use this at least once a week. markdownquote adds > before every line. I use it in Vim a lot; I select a region and then run :'<,'>!markdownquote to quote the selection. I use this about once a week. length foo returns 3 . (I should probably just use wc -c .) jsonformat takes JSON at stdin and pretty-prints it to stdout. I use this a few times a year. uppered and lowered convert strings to upper and lowercase. For example, echo foo | uppered returns FOO . I use these about once a week. nato bar returns Bravo Alfa Romeo . I use this most often when talking to customer service and need to read out a long alphanumeric string, which has only happened a couple of times in my whole life. But it’s sometimes useful! u+ 2025 returns ñ, LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE . A quick way to do a lookup of a Unicode string. I don’t use this one that often…probably about once a month. snippets foo cats ~/.config/evanhahn-snippets/foo . I use snippet arrow for → , snippet recruiter for a quick “not interested” response to job recruiters, snippet lorem to print a “Lorem ipsum” block, and a few others. I probably use one or two of these a week. REPL launchers Inspired by Ruby’s built-in irb REPL, I’ve made: iclj to start a Clojure REPL to start a Clojure REPL ijs to start a Deno REPL (or a Node REPL when Deno is missing) to start a Deno REPL (or a Node REPL when Deno is missing) iphp to start a PHP REPL to start a PHP REPL ipy to start a Python REPL to start a Python REPL isql to start a SQLite shell (an alias for sqlite3 :memory: ) hoy prints the current date in ISO format, like 2020-04-20 . I use this all the time because I like to prefix files with the current date. timer 10m starts a timer for 10 minutes, then (1) plays an audible ring sound (2) sends an OS notification (see notify below). I often use bb timer 5m to start a 5 minute timer in the background (see bb below). I use this almost every day as a useful way to keep on track of time. rn prints the current time and date using date and cal . I probably use it once a week. It prints something like this: 4:20PM on Wednesday, October 22, 2025 September 2025 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Audio and video and pictures ocr my_image.png extracts text from an image and prints it to stdout. It only works on macOS, unfortunately, but I want to fix that. (I wrote a post about this script.) boop (an alias, not a shell script) makes a happy sound if the previous command succeeded and a sad sound otherwise. I do things like run_the_tests ; boop which will tell me, audibly, whether the tests succeed. It’s also helpful for long-running commands, because you get a little alert when they’re done. I use this all the time. sfx foo basically just plays ~/.config/evanhahn-sfx/foo.ogg . Used in boop and timer above. tunes uses mpv to play audio from a file. I use this all the time, running tunes --shuffle ~/music . pix uses mpv to show a picture. I use this a few times a week to look at photos. radio is a little wrapper around some of my favorite internet radio stations. radio lofi and radio salsa are two of my favorites. I use this a few times a month. speak reads from stdin, removes all Markdown formatting, and pipes it to a text-to-speech system ( say on macOS and espeak-ng on Linux). I like using text-to-speech when I can’t proofread out loud. I use this a few times a month. shrinkvid is an ffmpeg wrapper that compresses a video a bit. I use this about once a month. removeexif removes EXIF data from JPEGs. I don’t use this much, in part because it doesn’t remove EXIF data from other file formats like PNGs…but I keep it around because I hope to expand this one day. tuivid is one I almost never use, but you can use it to watch videos in the terminal. It’s cursed and I love it, even if I never use it. Process management each is my answer to xargs and find ... -exec , which I find hard to use. For example, ls | each 'du -h {}' runs du -h on every file in a directory. I use this infrequently but I always mess up xargs so this is a nice alternative. running foo is like ps aux | grep foo but much easier (for me) to read—just the PID (highlighted in purple) and the command. murder foo or murder 1234 is a wrapper around kill that sends kill -15 $PID , waits a little, then sends kill -2 , waits and sends kill -1 , waits before finally sending kill -9 . If I want a program to stop, I want to ask it nicely before getting more aggressive. I use this a few times a month. waitfor $PID waits for a PID to exit before continuing. It also keeps the system from going to sleep. I use this about once a month to do things like: # I want to start something only after another process finishes waitfor 1234 ; something_else # I started a long-running process and want to know when it's done waitfor 1234 ; notify 'process 1234 is done' bb my_command is like my_command & but it really really runs it in the background. You’ll never hear from that program again. It’s useful when you want to start a daemon or long-running process you truly don’t care about. I use bb ollama serve and bb timer 5m most often. I use this about once a day. prettypath prints $PATH but with newlines separating entries, which makes it much easier to read. I use this pretty rarely—mostly just when I’m debugging a $PATH issue, which is unusual—but I’m glad I have it when I do. tryna my_command runs my_command until it succeeds. trynafail my_command runs my_command until it fails. I don’t use this much, but it’s useful for various things. tryna wget ... will keep trying to download something. trynafail npm test will stop once my tests start failing. Quick references emoji is my emoji lookup helper. For example, emoji cool prints the following: 😛 😒 😎 🪭 🆒 httpstatus prints all HTTP statuses. httpstatus 204 prints 204 No Content . As a web developer, I use this a few times a month, instead of looking it up online. alphabet just prints the English alphabet in upper and lowercase. I use this surprisingly often (probably about once a month). It literally just prints this: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ System management theme 0 changes my whole system to dark mode. theme 1 changes it to light mode. It doesn’t just change the OS theme—it also changes my Vim, Tmux, and terminal themes. I use this at least once a day. sleepybear puts my system to sleep, and works on macOS and Linux. I use this a few times a week. ds-destroy recursively deletes all .DS_Store files in a directory. I hate that macOS clutters directories with these files! I don’t use this often, but I’m glad I have it when I need it. Grab bag catbin foo is basically cat "$(which foo)" . Useful for seeing the source code of a file in your path (used it for writing up this post, for example!). I use this a few times a month. notify sends an OS notification. It’s used in several of my other scripts (see above). I also do something like this about once a month: run_some_long_running_process ; notify 'all done' uuid prints a v4 UUID. I use this about once a month. What about your scripts? These are just scripts I use a lot. I hope some of them are useful to you! If you liked this post, you might like “Why ‘alias’ is my last resort for aliases” and “A decade of dotfiles”. Oh, and contact me if you have any scripts you think I’d like.