Shell Utilities

I’ve written a bunch of small utilities that make my life in the terminal a little easier. Since I’m on Windows, I’m mainly using PowerShell, but I’ve also ported many of these to zsh.

with

In Unix shells, you can write things like this:

CC=gcc CXX=g++ cmake --preset=default

PowerShell lacks this feature, so I wrote a small script that works like this:

with CC=gcc,CXX=g++ cmake --preset=default

in

This one just saves me a couple keystrokes from having to cd somewhere and then cd back:

in build/bin ./myprogram

It runs the program in the specified directory without switching to it permanently.

swapd

This is useful if you’re working in two directories at once. It swaps your current directory with the top level of the pushd stack. No arguments.

glob

PowerShell doesn’t glob with native programs, which sometimes means a lot of repetition if I want to edit multiple files in a folder. With this program, I can now do:

nvim $(glob src/*.cpp)

up

This just saves a few keystrokes. It just goes up however many levels you give it:

up 3 # Equivalent to cd ../../..

syserr

This one runs on Windows, Linux, and other Unices (untested). It gives you a description of a system error code. Useful for debugging.