'Cheat sheet' CLI tool

I've recently made a little tool for myself (a very little tool) called 'cheat'. It is a command line tool which functions like a linux command line cheat sheet. Currently it consists of a .cheatrc file, containing a tab-separated table of handy commands and a description of what they do, and a script in /usr/bin which cats the file, greps for a search term and pipes to column for pretty printing. So whenever I come across a nifty bash command, i add it to my .cheatrc file and can find it easily later, with 'cheat <search term>'

For example suppose i want to find some info about my hard disk, if i run 'cheat disk', i get this;

dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh user@remote 'dd of=sda.gz' Backup harddisk to remote machine du -s * | sort -k1,1rn | head Show top disk users in current dir. See also dutop fdisk -l Show disks partitions sizes and types (run as root) smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours How long has this disk (system) been powered on in total hdparm -i /dev/sda Show info about disk sda hdparm -tT /dev/sda Do a read speed test on disk sda badblocks -s /dev/sda Test for unreadable blocks on disk sda

In future i want to add the ability to add cheats via the command line with 'cheat -a', 'cheat --add' or something.

The tool is almost ridiculously simple but i find i use it all the time, so my question is, do you think this project is worth developing into a full tool, releasing the source and trying to get it included in ubuntu releases? It certainly wouldn't waste much space on a live CD. Or has this been done already? Is there a better tool extant? Searching google for any combination of 'CLI' 'Cheat sheet' 'linux' and 'tool' only gives hundred of PDF linux cheat sheets, so i can't tell. What's your opinion?

[edit] The forum ignores tabs, so assume that the above output is all lined up in nice neat columns.

I just use the "man" function and it works very well.

Sometimes man is too confusing, or one forgets exactly which switches to use. Even though I know exactly which command I want, sometimes I end up googling the command for examples. I find that I make good use of the Zim desktop wiki for this. I've got a page full of linux tips with commands that I found myself googling multiple times (such as mencoder original.file -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1700 -o output.filename.avi to convert media files to .avi). Zim is great for taking little notes, just make sure to have it start at each session.

Yeah, it seems almost everyone has their own little system to do this or something similar. Everyone I've talked to at least keeps a list of nifty commands, whether or not they have a tool to search or add to them.

I'm thinking the community could really benefit from a de facto standard for the files, with a standard linux tool that can read them. I'm imagining sites maintaining communal lists of clever commands in the right format online, with 'cheat --update' to download the latest file from your preferred source. Blogs could offer cheatrc files to append to your own at the end of posts that contain clever command line tricks.

Afromonkey0 said: append to your own at the end of posts that contain clever command line tricks.

I think you might be onto something with this. I'd like to have a commandline tool that would allow me to save a number of customized strings that I would never remember (the long mencoder commands come to mind again). So if I want to convert a media file to .avi to watch on my set-top DVD/divx player, I could run, say "cheat mencoder" and pick the "convert to avi" customized command, but if I wanted to convert a media file to the tiny .mpg to watch on my Sansa, I could run the same "cheat mencoder" command to search for the "convert to Sansa" custom command.

Maybe I'm not making a lot of sense with these examples, but I can definitely see that this could be useful.

You have no idea how many times I've looked through my bash terminal command history to find a long, complex command - but can't find it because I used it way too long ago. :(

The command

man -k keyword

kind of does the same thing, doesn't it?

The command

man -k keyword

kind of does the same thing, doesn't it?

Not really. man -k or apropos will tell you what tools are related to a keyword, but man -k will never tell you that

ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS

lists all processes by memory usage, or that

dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh user@remote 'dd of=sda.gz'

backs up your hard disk to a remote machine.

Cheat lets you keep a record of clever command line tricks, rather than just what individual tools are for.