Tame your pesky little scripts : Juha-Matti Santala
Tame your pesky little scripts
May 27th, 2026
by Juha-Matti Santala
Mastodon
@hamatti@hamatti.org)
This was published in categories:
dev
cli
This blog post started its life as a lightning talk that I'm doing today at Aurajoki Overflow's afterwork. As I worked on the talk, I realised I had a more coherent<br>story to tell than I had already planned so now it gets a new life as a blog<br>post as well.
"Pesky little scripts" — a term I stole from<br>Redowan Delowar<br>— are all those shell scripts and fish functions and shell aliases you write<br>to make your own life easier. I don't know about you, but I have quite a few<br>of them and the collection keeps growing.
But they can get messy to organise, to remember and to run. Especially when<br>you start to add more than just shell scripts. My collection is a messy<br>amalgamation of bash, zsh, Python, Javascript and Rust scripts. Some of them I<br>use daily, others maybe once every two months.
There are a couple of main ideas that have had a big impact on how I manage<br>them and I've noticed that the amount of scripts and aliases I write has grown<br>immensly after I adopted these.
Namespacing
In PyCon Argentina 2018, Brandon Rhodes delivered a wonderful keynote<br>Activation Energy. In it, he talked about his journey to figure out ways to reduce the<br>activation energy that is needed to do things with software.
One of the these things was prefixing his custom shell scripts so they would<br>be easy to find.
He started by looking at all the characters he could start his scripts,<br>eliminating A-Z and 0-9 as they are commonly used and then eliminating all<br>characters that have special meaning in bash shell.
He ended up with 6 options:
@,<br>_,<br>+ and<br>: which all required using a Shift key
- which is a named command in bash
, which was the perfect prefix
-> , [tab]<br>,analytics ,tcg<br>,bookmarklet ,webmention<br>,confetti ,webp<br>,ptest ,zine
By typing , and hitting tab, I get<br>autocompletions for all my scripts and aliases. As long as their names remind<br>me what they do, this is a big improvement over having to think and remember<br>what you called you script and then wading through autocompletions of all the<br>built-in or 3rd party commands that have been installed in your system.
Shebang (#!)
Namespacing helps with remembering and finding your scripts but equally<br>crucial bit are<br>shebangs. A shebang is when your script starts with<br>#! and it tells the shell which software<br>you want to execute this script with.
You may have seen #!/bin/bash at the<br>start of a lot of shell scripts.
It's wonderful because it allows me to have a uniform naming scheme for all my<br>scripts (no script_a.py,<br>script_b.js and<br>script_c.sh) or having to run them with<br>python script_a.py (and so on...).
Every script is called by its name as they would be any other commands.
#!/bin/bash<br>#!/opt/homebrew/bin/node<br>#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --quiet --script<br>#!/usr/bin/env rustx
In one of our Python meetups, Tero gave an excellent lightning talk from which<br>I learned how to build<br>single-file executable Python scripts with dependencies. Combining that with the correct shebang and suddenly we have a Python<br>script that takes care of its own dependencies and is still runnable just as a<br>single command.
Now I can utilize whatever language I feel most comfortable in when solving a<br>specific problem. And as a user of my own scripts, I don't have to think about<br>that at all. I recently built a<br>,bookmarklet script in Javascript that<br>takes a filename as an argument, reads the file's contents and minifies the<br>code into a bookmarklet.
Lil' bit of custom tooling
One last thing I had to figure out was how to keep my scripts managed. They<br>may live in different parts of the filesystem and they may live in folders<br>with other scripts that I don't want to or need to manage.
So I created a repository called<br>pesky-little-scripts that has a single<br>shell script (link.sh) in the root and a<br>folder scripts/ where all my scripts<br>live in. That way, I can have all of them in one place and under version<br>control without having to do a lot of git excludes.
The link.sh script is my installer:
#!/bin/zsh
script=$1<br>scriptname=$(basename $script)
echo "Making $scriptname executable..."<br>chmod +x $script
echo "Linking $scriptname to /usr/local/bin...";<br>ln -s "$PWD/$script" "/usr/local/bin/$scriptname" # $PWD is needed since it requires an absolute path for the link to work.<br>rehash # Needed to update zsh cache for new scripts for autocomplete.
It makes the script executable (something I always used to forget), then<br>creates a symbolic link to<br>/usr/local/bin where my scripts live in<br>and finally, it runs rehash to update<br>the autocomplete cache so I can start to use the new script immediately.
Since it does not copy the file but links it, I can do all my future edits in<br>this folder, keep track of its history and it will always be at its latest<br>version when I run it.
If something above resonated with you, let's start a...