I love using curl command on my Mac terminal to debug my REST endpoints. However the REST call JSON output used to come in a blob of text which required further formatting in an Editor like Visual Studio Code. To allay this problem I ended up installing “jsonpp” using homebrew.

brew install jsonpp

So now I just pipe the output of my curl command to the jsonpp program and I get a fully formatted JSON.

$ curl http://localhost:8080/test | jsonpp
{
"year": 2018,
"month": 2,
"worked": 18,
"leaves": 2
}

I like to use curl instead of UI tools like Postman for debugging my RESTful web services traffic whenever possible. I however didn’t like my output being messed up by the bash prompt being suffixed to the output. Something like the following:

$ curl -H "$auth_token" http://localhost:8080/xyz/abc-efg
["-","A","B","C","D","E"]$

So basically what I needed was to have a new line forced after the curl output. A quick search on internet yielded this article. So I executed the following command on my terminal.

$ echo '-w "\n"' >> ~/.curlrc

After doing this when I execute the same curl command I get the following output.

$ curl -H "$auth_token" http://localhost:8080/xyz/abc-efg
["-","A","B","C","D","E"]
$

So now the bash prompt is actually coming on a new line by default!

I found a good link which lists good usages of the Linux command “du”.

This command allows me to see the usage in a ascending sort which is really helpful.

Tested on Linux.
du -h / | sort -h

Tested on Mac OS.
du -hs * | gsort -h

In case you don’t have gsort install coreutils.
brew install coreutils

This variation allows me to see any line which has the text “G” in it which basically allows me to see folders using space in GBs. Agreed it might give some folder names as well with “G” in it but I can bear with it.

Tested on Linux.
du -h /the/path | sort -h | grep "G"

Tested on Mac OS.
du -h /the/path | gsort -h | grep "G"