Cheat Sheet

Charly's Column – cheat.sh

Article from Issue 217/2018
Author(s):

Whenever you really need documentation, it's almost always incomplete or outdated – or both. Sys admin columnist Charly K¸hnast recommends a radically different approach: the universal community documentation cheat.sh, which no Linux command and hardly any programming language should do without.

Even at school, teachers encouraged us to make cheat sheets – although actually using them was forbidden. Writing a cheat sheet helps you to keep things in mind longer. Cheat sheets are also useful after school.

For example, I have a coffee cup printed with maybe 50 important Vim commands that I occasionally consult for its more obscure finger exercises. Oddly, the matching 20-liter bucket with the basic command set for Emacs, which I saw at a Chaos Communication Congress, seems to have remained a one-off – clearly a missed opportunity.

I created an electronic cheat sheet, in which I archive code snippets and brief how-tos, in Nextcloud. Nevertheless, questions continually pop up for which I have to resort to the search engine that I mistrust the least. How do you overwrite a MAC address? How do you sort an array in Go? How do you discover the MIME encoding of a file? If only I had a cheat sheet for all of this!

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Download Article PDF now with Express Checkout
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subscriptions
Digital Subscriptions

Related content

  • navi

    When the history function fails and the manpage is too long, navi comes to the rescue with an interactive cheat sheet for the shell.

    more »
  • The sys admin's daily grind: colorls

    The first time in our lives we got to a black-and-white Linux or Unix shell, most of us probably typed ls first. In a mixture of nostalgia and the knowledge that life is colorful, columnist Charly Kühnast plays a colorful trump card with colorls.

    more »
  • FOSSPicks

    Graham tears himself away from updating Arch Linux to search for the best new free software.

    more »
  • Charly's Column – httpstat

    Httpstat is a special stopwatch you can use to discover how long web servers take to serve up a static or dynamic HTML page. Visible performance lags indicate optimization potential for the server.

    more »
  • Cheat: Cheatsheets for Command-Line Tools
    more »
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source