I really like using the command line for automating tasks. There are some things that a GUI is handier for, but having scripts handy is a very nice place to be.
One trick I’ve started using is writing small wrapper scripts (using batch files at work) for tools like RipGrep or NUnit3-console. This makes it far easier to edit those commands, and save back examples of doing different things, especially for commands with more involved parameter lists. It makes it possible to add small things, like output delimiters between search results, or to do log actions to a file or the like. It also makes it easy to reduce the total amount of typing I have to do in a given command prompt.
An example, using RipGrep, in a file called search.bat on my PATH.
REM banner is a program that spits out "-", as wide as the terminal is
REM it takes a color as its only argument.
banner blue
REM %dp~1 here is a batch-ism for getting the _first_ paramter to a batch script
rg -iw -pcre --glob "!*.xml" %dp~1
REM Other useful argument combos
REM -tcs -tsql -Txml
The nice thing about this approach is that lets me pull up an editor for when I want edit a given command and it makes using multiple arguments to --glob much easier. Were I to start using find on Unix a lot, it’d probably get a similar treatment. It’s definitely a nice thing to have on hand for more involved command-line tools.
Published Jan 12, 2020