Handy things to know when using bash

A random collection of things that at one time or another caused me misery and despair before I knew them.

• If you somehow manage to create a file whose name starts with a dash, like "-filename", it will be interpreted as a command line option. You can delete it with rm -- -filename
• If you want to include an apostrophe in awk output, it will be interpreted as the end of the command. Replace it with "\0147".
• If you track things with git, and you have files with long lines, then git diff --word-diff will be clearer than git diff
• To get a solar mass symbol in gnuplot, simply set the terminal type to pngcairo and copy this into your plot script: ☉
• If you want to copy multiple files from a remote server using scp, enclose the path in quotes, otherwise the local shell tries to interpret the wildcards instead of the remote shell.
• Mounting the remote file system in a directory with sshfs is way better than using scp for that anyway. e.g.:

  mkdir remotelocation
  sshfs username@remoteserver: remotelocation
  mv files remotelocation/directoryonremoteserver/
  mv remotelocation/anotherdirectory/anotherfile.dat .
  fusermount -u -z remotelocation
  

• If you want to log in to machine machineB which is only accessible from machine machineA, you can do it in one step with ssh -A -t machineA ssh -A -t machineB
• ..and if you wanted to mount machineB (in a directory called B): sshfs machineB: B/ -o ssh_command='ssh -A -t machineA ssh -A -t'
• ..and if you want to rsync: rsync -arzv -e 'ssh -o "ProxyCommand ssh -A machineA -W %h:%p"' foo/ machineB:./foo/
• To scp a file containing colons, give a relative or absolute path to stop the file name being interpreted as a server name. scp awkward:file:name.dat will not work, but scp ./awkward:file:name.dat will.
• To include a figure with full stops in its filename in a latex document, enclose the file name in curly brackets: \includegraphics{{filename.with.full.stops}.png}