Using Cheat sheets

Oct 01, 2023

Recently I have come across a few other ways to get help on terminal commands and some examples. Sometimes you need a quick note about a command and there are a few ways to do this. Many terminal based languages and even the operating system have a help system.

Powershell = Get-Help
Linux = man

Both the commands can display help about the commands you need. Sometimes these are missing a few things, like good examples rather than just concepts of the command. This is where many 3rd party help systems come in to help.

There is a popular one I've used before called cheat.sh where you can do a curl request to the site and the command.

curl cheat.sh/ls

# To display everything in <dir>, excluding hidden files:
ls <dir>

# To display everything in <dir>, including hidden files:
ls -a <dir>

# To display all files, along with the size (with unit suffixes) and timestamp:
ls -lh <dir>

# To display files, sorted by size:
ls -S <dir>

# To display directories only:
ls -d */ <dir>

# To display directories only, include hidden:
ls -d .*/ */ <dir>

# To display all files sorted by changed date, most recent first:
ls -ltc 

# To display files sorted by create time:
ls -lt

# To display files in a single column:
ls -1

# To show ACLs (MacOS):
# see also `cheat chmod` for `/bin/chmod` options for ACLs
/bin/ls -le

# To show all the subtree files (Recursive Mode):
ls -R

 ...

Issues on Windows

I ran this with PowerShell and we had to select the Content to get it to output right. So to get around this, I wrote a PowerShell wrapper around this concept.

function cht{

  [CmdletBinding()]
  param (
      [Parameter(Mandatory)]
      [string]$cht
  )

  try {
      (Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing https://cht.sh/$cht).Content
  }
  catch {
      Write-Output "There was an issue finding help."
  }

}

This wrapper function takes a parameter which is your command to search for, then does the Invoke-WebRequest and selects the Content already for us.

Check out the full function on my snippets

Other alternatives

I have used cheat.sh for quite a while, but there are some alternatives, both online and offline offerings. All of these resources support many languages, operating systems, and more.

I'm publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting 100DaysToOffload.com.

Using Cheat sheets

Issues on Windows

Other alternatives

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