Comment by russellbeattie
1 year ago
The moment of true enlightenment is when you finally decide to once and for all memorize all the arguments and their order for those command line utilities that you use at an interval that's just at the edge of your memory: xargs, find, curl, rsync, etc.
That, plus knowing how to parse a man file to actually understand how to use a command (a skill that takes years to master) pretty much removes the need for most aliases and scripts.
I already have limited space for long term memory, bash commands are very far down the list of things I'd want to append to my long term storage.
I use ctrl-R with a fuzzy matching program, and let my terminal remember it for me.
And before it's asked: yes that means I'd have more trouble working in a different/someone else's environment. But as it barely ever happens for me, it's hardly an important enough scenario to optimize for.
Why would I even attempt to do that? Life is too short to try to remember something like that. Maybe 20 years ago when internet was not that common. Or maybe if you are a hacker, hacking other peoples machines. Me? Just some dev trying yo make some money to feed my family? I prefer to have a walk to the woods.