Command-Line-Foo

Becoming tired of typing paths repeatedly in the terminal, I realized that I should be using pushd and popd to be navigating directory structures. For those uninitiated, pushd changes your current directory in a similar fashion to cd but additionally adds the former directory to a stack. You can later return to the former directory by executing popd, popping it from the directory history. Unfortunately, the commands pushd and popd both require at least twice as many characters to type as cd and additionally come with the overhead of having to learnt o use a new command instead of something that is nearly instinctual. Then it came to me: pushd all the time. ...

The other week I found myself up at 2am in Canada setting up a VPN between my home computer (running Ubuntu) in Seattle and my laptop <partyhard.jpg>. I had enabled SSH access on my home computer and had set up port forwarding on my router to allow for access from the outside world ahead of time, but had forgotten that I would need to have a port forwarded for the VPN server as well. I tried to SSH into my home box and access the router’s admin interface from the commandline browser (using Lynx and w3m). This was a bad idea and didn’t work, as the browser’s admin page required JavaScript for some odd reason. ...