Gratitude Day 19: UNIX Shell

Sat 19 September 2026

Disclaimer: This post was indirectly inspired by a similar (and very enjoyable) post by the amazing Stefano, but it was germinating in my brain long before I realized the thematic similarities.

I've been programming in UNIX shell (mainly ksh, then bash, and now a bit more POSIX shell) for about a quarter century, now. It's really my favorite environment.

First, let's get some common objections out the way.

No serious programmer writes in shell! They use Python, I mean C, I mean assembly, I mean a magnetized needle and a steady hand, I mean C-x M-c M-butterfly

Yeah, you're probably right. Next?

Who needs bash/POSIX shell? My shell has pretty colors, a 3D interactive prompt and status line, full git integration, an app store, and takes full advantage of my GPU-accelerated terminal that runs on my 1024-core gaming computer with its own micro-fusion reactor!

I'm happy for you. Genuinely. 😄

I've been using Unix-based OSes (first various Linux distros, then OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and now NetBSD as well) as my full-time daily-drivers for seven years now. In that time, I've slowly grown a decently sizeable collection of scripts and functions that make daily life way more enjoyable:

rld@Intrepid:~$ echo; \
> echo "   lines   words   bytes"; \
> find bin bin/scripts -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec wc {} + \
>     |grep total \
>     |sed 's|total|(~/bin total)|'; \
> echo "----------------------------------------"; \
> wc .bash_[af]*

   lines   words   bytes
   20870  286632 2146265 (~/bin total)
----------------------------------------
     414    2140   18387 .bash_aliases
    2074    7907   59284 .bash_functions
    2488   10047   77671 total
rld@Intrepid:~$ #functions:
rld@Intrepid:~$ declare -F |grep -c '^declare -f [^_]'
150
rld@Intrepid:~$ #aliases:
rld@Intrepid:~$ alias |wc -l
     135
rld@Intrepid:~$

Theres some things that I really, really love about this environment.

First of all, shell scripts and shell functions can build on each other. It's the "write several small tools that do one thing well and can work together" aspect of The Unix Philosophy in motion, and it makes for a really enjoyable experience of slowly building a decent-sized toolchest of utilities organically.

Now, of course, I don't use all of those scripts every day. I don't use most of them hardly at all:

rld@Intrepid:~$ echo; \
> echo "count  epoch-rounded  gregorian-date"; \
> find bin bin/scripts -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec stat -f %a {} + \
>     |sort -n |sed -E 's/[0-9]{6}$/000000/' |uniq -c \
>     |while read line
> do
>     count=${line%% *}
>     epoch=${line##* }
>     printf "%4d %12d     " $count $epoch
>     date -r $epoch
> done

count  epoch-rounded  gregorian-date
 145   1763000000     Wed Nov 12 20:13:20 CST 2025
   9   1764000000     Mon Nov 24 10:00:00 CST 2025
   2   1765000000     Fri Dec  5 23:46:40 CST 2025
   3   1766000000     Wed Dec 17 13:33:20 CST 2025
   1   1767000000     Mon Dec 29 03:20:00 CST 2025
   1   1768000000     Fri Jan  9 17:06:40 CST 2026
   1   1769000000     Wed Jan 21 06:53:20 CST 2026
   2   1770000000     Sun Feb  1 20:40:00 CST 2026
   1   1773000000     Sun Mar  8 15:00:00 CDT 2026
   1   1774000000     Fri Mar 20 04:46:40 CDT 2026
   2   1776000000     Sun Apr 12 08:20:00 CDT 2026
   4   1777000000     Thu Apr 23 22:06:40 CDT 2026
   4   1778000000     Tue May  5 11:53:20 CDT 2026
   3   1779000000     Sun May 17 01:40:00 CDT 2026
  11   1780000000     Thu May 28 15:26:40 CDT 2026
   1   1781000000     Tue Jun  9 05:13:20 CDT 2026
   2   1782000000     Sat Jun 20 19:00:00 CDT 2026
   2   1784000000     Mon Jul 13 22:33:20 CDT 2026
   1   1785000000     Sat Jul 25 12:20:00 CDT 2026
   6   1787000000     Mon Aug 17 15:53:20 CDT 2026
  16   1788000000     Sat Aug 29 05:40:00 CDT 2026
   3   1789000000     Wed Sep  9 19:26:40 CDT 2026
rld@Intrepid:~$ 
rld@Intrepid:~$ find bin bin/scripts -maxdepth 1 -type f |wc -l
     221
rld@Intrepid:~$

In the above code snippet, I've taken the atime (last access time) of every file in my ~/bin directory, rounded it (well, truncated) to the nearest million seconds (11 days, 13:46:40), printed how many files were accessed within that million second window, and printed the Gregorian date equivalent of that epoch date.

According to the above, I set up this laptop some time last November (accurate), and I've only used 25 of my 211 scripts in the last month or so.

Oh wait... I've just realized that atime on this system is not reliable. I should have known, derp:

rld@Intrepid:~$ mount |grep noatime
zroot/ROOT/14.3-RELEASE-p6_2025-12-05_225632 on / (zfs, local, noatime, nfsv4acls)
zroot/var/audit on /var/audit (zfs, local, noatime, noexec, nosuid, nfsv4acls)
zroot/usr/src on /usr/src (zfs, local, noatime, nfsv4acls)
zroot on /zroot (zfs, local, noatime, nfsv4acls)
zroot/var/crash on /var/crash (zfs, local, noatime, noexec, nosuid, nfsv4acls)
zroot/usr/ports on /usr/ports (zfs, local, noatime, nosuid, nfsv4acls)
zroot/var/log on /var/log (zfs, local, noatime, noexec, nosuid, nfsv4acls)
zroot/var/tmp on /var/tmp (zfs, local, noatime, nosuid, nfsv4acls)
zroot/home on /home (zfs, local, noatime, nfsv4acls)
zroot/home/rxl on /home/rxl (zfs, local, noatime, nfsv4acls)

So instead, I went through my command history on this machine for the past month, and analyzed what commands/scripts/aliases I used:

  1 cal2 is an alias
  1 cdclip is an alias
  1 clipclear is /home/rld/bin/clipclear
  1 cppwd is an alias
  1 de_banner is /home/rld/bin/de_banner
  1 dectohex is /home/rld/bin/dectohex
  1 fedimeteo is an alias
  1 figletfonts is an alias
  1 freebsdfree is /home/rld/bin/freebsdfree
  1 help is an alias
  1 mcd is a function
  1 notice is /home/rld/bin/notice
  1 ramhogs is a function
  1 snarfclear is /home/rld/bin/snarfclear
  1 snarfi is /home/rld/bin/snarfi
  1 stls is a function
  1 strip-jpeg-MP is /home/rld/bin/strip-jpeg-MP
  1 swc is a function
  1 temps is /home/rld/bin/temps
  1 tootuser is /home/rld/bin/tootuser
  1 ulocate is /home/rld/bin/ulocate
  1 uptime is an alias
  1 weather is an alias
  1 webview is a function
  1 zipinfo is an alias
  2 /home/rld/Documents/writings/blog/pelican/content/count2
  2 binfind is a function
  2 clear2 is an alias
  2 clipi is /home/rld/bin/clipi
  2 edvis is a function
  2 ifsn is a function
  2 showclip is /home/rld/bin/showclip
  2 visway is an alias
  3 /home/rld/battery_ctrl.sh
  3 bookmarks is an alias
  3 dwroulette is /home/rld/bin/dwroulette
  3 edir is an alias
  3 emoji-picker is /home/rld/bin/emoji-picker
  3 giturl is a function
  3 pwdl is a function
  3 searchall is /home/rld/bin/searchall
  4 tootlookup is a function
  4 yt-dlp is an alias
  5 battime is an alias
  5 blogwordcount is /home/rld/bin/blogwordcount
  5 datestamp is /home/rld/bin/datestamp
  5 duh is /home/rld/bin/duh
  5 ffprobe is an alias
  5 sdiff is an alias
  5 updateall is /home/rld/bin/updateall
  5 yt-mpv is /home/rld/bin/yt-mpv
  6 grepc is a function
  6 invid is a function
  6 snarftoclip is /home/rld/bin/snarftoclip
  6 toot is an alias
  7 /home/rld/Documents/writings/blog/pelican/content/count
  7 /home/rld/Documents/writings/blog/pelican/content/mksymlink
  7 cp is an alias
  7 df is an alias
  7 mpv is an alias
  7 open is an alias
  7 tootme is /home/rld/bin/tootme
  8 battestimate is a function
  8 blogme is /home/rld/bin/blogme
  8 daylog is /home/rld/bin/daylog
  8 free is an alias
  8 lsgrep is a function
  9 fcal is /home/rld/bin/fcal
  9 histbackup is /home/rld/bin/histbackup
  9 mv is an alias
  9 pkgbins is /home/rld/bin/pkgbins
  9 unixnotes is a function
 10 psgrep is /home/rld/bin/psgrep
 11 s is an alias
 12 ststatus is an alias
 14 snarfedit is hashed (/home/rld/bin/snarfedit)
 15 nsxiv is an alias
 16 dict is an alias
 16 rld is an alias
 16 wifiscan is a function
 19 biblegrep is a function
 23 /home/rld/Documents/writings/blog/pelican/blogcal
 26 clipo is /home/rld/bin/clipo
 28 snarfo is hashed (/home/rld/bin/snarfo)
 64 ll is an alias
 71 duck is /home/rld/bin/duck
 86 grep is an alias
223 ls is an alias

Sorry if this schlocky, sleep-deprived technomissive isn't quite comprehensible today. I'm gonna call it a blost. CHEERS! 😂

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