mikas blog

Someone asked me to provide Zsh tips as kind of an advent calendar in my blog. I like the idea but don’t want to restrict it to Zsh only but instead provide hints that might be interesting in general for the readers of my blog. So there we go…

Of course let’s start with the best interactive shell: Zsh. If you don’t use Zsh yet please consider giving it a try, seriously. If you don’t know grml’s Zsh configuration check out "Make console work comfortable".

One nice feature of Zsh is the concept of hashes. Instead of typing /var/cache/apt/archives manually we specify a hash entry named deb running "hash -d deb=/var/cache/apt/archives". Then we can use for example "cd ~deb" instead of "cd /var/cache/apt/archives". Some further examples for inspiration (extracted from grml’s zsh configuration of course):

hash -d deb=/var/cache/apt/archives
hash -d doc=/usr/share/doc
hash -d linux=/lib/modules/$(command uname -r)/build/
hash -d log=/var/log
hash -d slog=/var/log/syslog
hash -d src=/usr/src
hash -d www=/var/www

So you don’t have to type "ls -la /usr/share/doc/zsh/" but just use "ls -la ~doc/zsh/" and instead of "cd /var/www" you can use "cd ~www". Got the idea?

This entry was posted by mika on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 14:42 and is filed under Computer, English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.