this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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I accidentally found out one day that I could use a wildcard operator in the terminal instead of a full file or folder name due to always doing this.
Will for example open my "Photo Examples" folder in the working directory or based on the path
With ZSH there's something called "path-completion" that makes that even easier.
Say you want to go to "/usr/local/share/fonts" but that's too much to type out, you can instead type "cd /u/l/s/f" and hit tab. If every path element is unambiguous it will just expand it to "/usr/local/share/fonts". In this case though, "/u/l/" can expand to "/usr/local" or "/usr/lib" so when you hit tab it moves the cursor to just after the "l" to indicate it needs you to distinguish between "/usr/local/" and "/usr/lib". If you just type "o" and hit tab again, it will know that there's only one match for "/usr/lo" and expand that to "/usr/local/" Then there's only one match for "s" which is "share", and only one match for "f" which is "fonts".
That avoids the danger of executing a command with an asterisk wildcard.
works in fish shell as well.
You can use
||between two commands as well. If the first command returns exit code != 0, the second command will run.I.e.
which ansible || pip install ansible.Or && for if you only want the second command to run if the first command succeeded.
This only works until you grow an addiction to making pho at home and start documenting your progress.
cd /
sudo rm -rf *
Basically the Linux version of deleting system32 but idk I'm not a super Linux nerd yet.
The fun thing is that you can create a file named "-rf *" and hope an admin tried to delete it!