After talking to a friend of mine Jeff Larkin about bash prompts, I decided to modify what he did into a single line bash prompt. By adding the following to your .bashrc you’ll get the branch your on in git (if current directory is tracked), a color denoting the status of the branch as well as the return code of the last command (if non-zero)

We use Elluminate Live! for some of our meetings, and it has always bothered me that I have to launch the browser to use Elluminate especially for reoccurring meetings. So one afternoon I set out to fix this problem. I wrote the following script and have been using it for about a month now without any issues. You can set the parameters at the head of the script if you have a reoccurring meeting you want to use, or set the parameters at run time (or in an alias for multiple reoccurring meetings) if you need too.

One thing I find myself doing a lot is swapping two files in bash. I thought about making this into a bash script then I realized 1) that’s over kill and 2) not as portable as I want. So, if you add this to your .bashrc then re-source it, you’ll be able to run the command swap to switch two files

function swap() {
  TMP_NAME="TMP_$RANDOM"
  mv "$1" "/tmp/$TMP_NAME" && mv "$2" "$1" && mv "/tmp/$TMP_NAME" "$2"
}