Tiny shell helpers I keep rewriting
2026-01-09
Every time I get a new laptop I notice that I reach for the same handful of shell helpers in the first week. They're never part of my dotfiles repo because they feel too small to commit, and so I end up typing them out from memory each time. This post is mostly for future me.
Find the biggest things in a directory
du -sh -- * 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail -n 20
Run this at the root of whatever disk is suspiciously full. Nine times
out of ten it's a forgotten Docker volume or a node_modules
that nobody is using.
Quick HTTP server in the current directory
python3 -m http.server 8000
Embarrassingly useful. I use it for sharing a file on the local
network, for previewing a static site, and for the occasional
curl smoke test.
Watch a log with colour
tail -F /var/log/whatever | grep --color=always -E 'ERROR|WARN|$'
The trailing |$ keeps every line, but colours only the
matches. I stole this years ago from a stackoverflow answer and it has
never let me down.
The one I always forget
find . -type f -mtime -1Files modified in the last day, from the current directory down. I reach for this whenever something mysterious has changed and I want to know what.
None of these are clever. That's sort of the point. The longer I do this job the more I appreciate small tools that do one thing and don't surprise me.