Question

Want to upgrade my file management productivity by replacing 2 panel file manager with command line (bash or cygwin). Can commandline give same speed? Please advise a guru way of how to do e.g. copy of some file in directory A to the directory B. Is it heavy use of pushd/popd? Or creation of links to most often used directories? What are the best practices and a day-to-day routine to manage files of a command line master?

Answer 1

Can commandline give same speed?

My experience is that commandline copying is significantly faster (especially in the Windows environment). Of course the basic laws of physics still apply, a file that is 1000 times bigger than a file that copies in 1 second will still take 1000 seconds to copy.

..(howto) copy of some file in directory A to the directory B.

Because I often have 5-10 projects that use similar directory structures, I set up variables for each subdir using a naming convention :

project=NewMatch
NM_scripts=${project}/scripts
NM_data=${project}/data
NM_logs=${project}/logs
NM_cfg=${project}/cfg

proj2=AlternateMatch
altM_scripts=${proj2}/scripts
altM_data=${proj2}/data
altM_logs=${proj2}/logs
altM_cfg=${proj2}/cfg

You can make this sort of thing as spartan or baroque as needed to match your theory of living/programming.

Then you can easily copy the cfg from 1 project to another
cp -p $NM_cfg/*.cfg ${altM_cfg}

Is it heavy use of pushd/popd?

Some people seem to really like that. You can try it and see what you thing.

Or creation of links to most often used directories?

Links to dirs are, in my experience used more for software development where a source code is expecting a certain set of dir names, and your installation has different names. Then making links to supply the dir paths expected is helpful. For production data, is just one more thing that can get messed up, or blow up. That’s not always true, maybe you’ll have a really good reason to have links, but I wouldn’t start out that way, just because it is possible to do.

What are the best practices and a day-to-day routine to manage files of a command line master?

( Per above, use standardized directory structure for all projects.
Have scripts save any small files to a directory your dept keeps in the /tmp dir, .
i.e /tmp/MyDeptsTmpFile (named to fit your local conventions) )

It depends. If you’re talking about data and logfiles, dated fileNames can save you a lot of time. I recommend dateFmts like YYYYMMDD(_HHMMSS) if you need the extra resolution.

Dated logfiles are very handy, when a current process seems like it is taking a long time, you can look at the log file from a week ago and quantify exactly how long this process took, a week, month, 6 months (up to how much space you can afford). LogFiles should also capture all STDERR messages, so you never have to re-run a bombed program just to see what the error message was.

This is Linux/Unix you’re using, right? Read the man page for the cp cmd installed on your machine. I recommend using an alias like alias CP='/bin/cp -pi' so you always copy a file with the same permissions and with the original files’ time stamp. Then it is easy to use /bin/ls -ltr to see a sorted list of files with the most recent files showing up at the bottom of the list. (No need to scroll back to the top, when you sort by time,reverse). Also the ‘-i’ option will warn you that you are going to overwrite a file, and this has saved me more than a couple of times.

I hope this helps.

P.S. as you appear to be a new user, if you get an answer that helps you please remember to mark it as accepted, and/or give it a + (or -) as a useful answer.