Pet - A Command Line Snippet Manager for Linux

If you manage a lot of Linux systems via command line, you must be aware of the hectic task to remember all the commands you use on daily basis. You often need to go into your system's history and find the required commands from there. Pet is a command line based tool which makes a system administrator's life easy. It is an easy to use snippet manager, which saves your command snippets and you can easily view and use them when needed. Command line junkies find this tool extremely important, it is completely a freeware script, the setup process is pretty simple and it runs on almost all flavors of Linux operating system as well as Mac OS. It is built using the well known Go programming language and requires some python modules like Peco and brew to work properly. It is written by Teppei Fukuda and its source code is available on Github. In this tutorial, we will discuss its prominent features, installation process, and some usage example. Stay with us, it's going to be an interesting session.

Important Features of Pet

Here are some of the noteworthy features of this utility, it can:

• register your new command snippets pretty quickly.
• search through the local repository of command snippets.
• easily edit and run command snippets.
• use Gist (GitHub-based online code repository) to sync your snippets.

Feeling excited? Let's get started on its installation and configuration process now.

How to manage Python projects using...

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How to manage Python projects using Virtualenv Installing and Using Pet

We will be demonstrating the installation and usage process of Pet on Ubuntu 16.10 system, the same set of instructions should work for any older version of Ubuntu and Debian based systems. As mentioned in the introductory paragraph, it requires Peco and brew to work properly. Run following two commands respectively to install Brew and Peco on your Linux system.

sudo apt-get install linuxbrew-wrapper
sudo brew install peco

Once the pre-requisites have been properly installed, run following command to download the source file for Pet.

sudo wget https://github.com/knqyf263/pet/releases/download/v0.0.2/pet_0.0.2_linux_amd64.zip

Depending on your network speed, it should take a couple of minutes to complete the download process. Run the following mentioned command to unzip the downloaded file.

unzip pet_0.0.2_linux_amd64.zip

Once the unzip process is complete, you should be able to see an executable script, named "pet" here. Run the following command to copy this script file to proper location so it may be available for use for all users.

sudo cp pet /usr/local/bin

There you go, Pet has been configured successfully now. Run "pet" command on the terminal to verify that it is working properly. Expected output should be as depicted in the following screenshot.

Let's demonstrate some examples, in order to add the new snippets, use the following command:

pet new

It will prompt you the two details, "Command" and "Description". I have following command I often use on my Linux web servers to identify if my server is under DDOS attack or not.

netstat -nap | grep \:80\  | awk '{print $5}' | tr ":" " " | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Below screenshot will clarify how I added this snippet to Pet.

Similarly, you can use the following command to list the currently added snippets.

pet list

You can search through added snippets using the following command:

pet search

You can easily register the previously executed commands to the pet database by edit your .zshrc file. Use vi or vim editor to open the .zshrc file and append the following lines there:

function prev() {
PREV=$(fc -lrn | head -n 1)
sh -c "pet new `printf %q "$PREV"`"
}

Now you don't need to add each command manually to Pet, your system will automatically add all the commands you use to the snippet manager. Your daily work life is lot easy now :)

Sync Snippets to Gist

As mentioned in the feature list, you can sync your snippets with online Gist repository, for this purpose you must have a Github account, once you have GitHub account, you can get a GIST Token easily. Use the following command to sync your snippets to Gist, it will prompt for Token ID and you should be good to go.

 pet sync -u

Here is the sample output of this command:

 pet sync -u
Gist ID: 1P93IUdf4e06d117097en976BHY
Upload success

Similarly, you can download your snippets from Gist to your system using the following command. It is pretty useful when you want to migrate your snippet data to any other system.

pet sync

Hope you enjoyed this article, we have discussed all possible usages of Pet utility here. It is an extremely lightweight, easy to use, and stable utility which is a must-have application for any command line Linux lover. It is under continuous development and we hope to see many improvements to this application in near future. If you have any questions or feedback, fee free to let us know in the comments section of this article.