Tricks & hacks

Trick Terminal Check redirects and headers from the terminal with curl Follow a redirect chain, check a status code, time a page and test a whole list of old URLs with curl. Each one takes a single line. September 25, 2026 · 3 min read

Trick Everyday How to calculate an ex-GST price in Australia Divide the GST-inclusive price by 1.1 to get the ex-GST price, or divide it by 11 to get the GST. So $110 is $100 plus $10 GST. February 1, 2020 · 4 min read

Trick Terminal Use the Linux command line on Windows 11 and 10 with WSL Open PowerShell as administrator, run wsl --install and restart. You get Ubuntu with a real bash shell, running alongside Windows. November 19, 2019 · 4 min read

Trick Terminal How to create and use shell aliases on macOS and Linux An alias turns a long command into a short one, like alias ll='ls -lah'. Add it to ~/.zshrc on a Mac or ~/.bashrc on Linux to keep it for good. June 19, 2019 · 4 min read

Trick Terminal How to kill a process using a TCP port on Mac Find what's holding the port with lsof -nP -iTCP:8000 -sTCP:LISTEN, then stop it with kill PID. I keep kill -9 as a last resort. June 17, 2019 · 4 min read

Trick Terminal How to add a folder to your $PATH on Mac (zsh and bash) Add export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" to ~/.zprofile and open a new Terminal window. Typing export on its own only changes the current window. April 21, 2019 · 5 min read

Trick Terminal How to copy a remote folder to your computer with rsync Run rsync -avz user@server:/path/to/folder/ ./folder/ to pull a folder over SSH. After the first copy, rsync only sends what has changed. January 19, 2019 · 4 min read

Trick Terminal How to create a symlink to a folder on Linux and Mac Run ln -s /real/folder link-name to make a folder appear in a second place. I cover argument order, relative links, repointing with -sfn and safe removal. December 31, 2018 · 5 min read