Unsung Heroes of the Command Line

[securitybreach]

Since the command line is my primary way of interacting with my computer, I often will take steps to optimize my usage of it. Most command line users know the basics - ls, cd, grep, etc; these are instrumental building blocks in using the command line. However, there are often more specialized programs out there that can really save you some time, and I'd like to share a few notable examples of these kinds of specialized programs that have made my life easier over the last year or two. If you don't know them, hopefully you'll find them useful; if you do know them, hopefully it will just indicate that we both have good taste in our tools. =)

 

mojo

 

Over the past few years, I find myself doing more and more work with data online. Calling out to various web services or fetching content from a URL has become an essential part of being a developer. When it comes down to simply fetching the data, I reach for curl. However, if I have to do some slicing and dicing, I look to my good friend mojo.

 

mojo is a command line utility shipped with the Mojolicious project - it's a kind of web toolkit for Perl programmers. You don't need to be skilled in Perl to make use of mojo, however. mojo get allows you to fetch the contents at aURL, select particular elements via CSS3 selectors, and then transform the result using various methods. For example, let's say I want to get the src attribute of each img element on a page. This is how I could invoke mojo get to get the job done:

 

mojo get http://example.com img attr src

 

The img part is of course the element selector; the arguments following it are a method name (any method in Mojo::DOM may be used) plus any arguments for the method. I've found mojo get to be invaluable in scraping a document and extracting some content from it for use further down the command line....

 

http://hoelz.ro/blog...he-command-line