"Howdoi" - Get instant coding answers in your terminal itself

If you’re  a sysadmin, programmer, or even a hacker, you might come across a situation where you quickly want to know an answer to a simple question, like “How to get epoch time on bash?”, or whatever. What you usually do is, open up the browser, start searching in google. But, what if I told you you can get the answer from your command line / terminal itself? Sounds cool, right? There is this tool called “howdoi” which does exactly that. I’ll show you a couple of examples to get the idea of how this tool can help you.

The following is several queries i made to check if this tool actually works. Don’t ask me if it works, checkout for yourself.

root ~ # howdoi epoch time in bash
date +%s


root ~ # howdoi multiline comment in python
'''
This is a multiline
comment.
'''


root ~ # howdoi  sort ls by modified time
ls -t


root ~ # howdoi unique array python
my_list = list(set(my_list))


root ~ # howdoi unique php array
$input = array_map("unserialize", array_unique(array_map("serialize", $input)));


root ~ # howdoi declare hash perl
use strict;
use warnings;  # Must-haves

# ... Initialize your arrays

my @fields = ('currency_symbol', 'currency_name');
my @array = ('BRL','Real');

# ... Assign to your hash

my %hash;
@hash{@fields} = @array;

How about that? It does a  google search and gives you the best answer. I’m pretty sure that you’re impressed. So, let me show you how you can install it

How to install “howdoi” on your Linux Machine Link to heading

For Ubuntu / Linux Mint and other derivatives: Link to heading

# First of all, you need to install some libraries.. 
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt-dev python-dev lib32z1-dev

# Install PIP if not already installed
sudo apt-get install python-pip

# install "howdoi" using pip
sudo pip install howdoi

For Centos 5/6/7 / Fedora 21/22 and other rpm based distros: Link to heading

# Install the required packages and libraries
sudo yum install -y gcc libxml2 libxml2-devel libxslt libxslt-devel python-devel

# Install epel repo if not already installed
sudo yum install epel-release

# install pip
sudo yum --enablerepo=epel install python-pip

# install "howdoi" using pip
sudo pip install howdoi

That’s it, “howdoi” is now installed on your machine. All you have to do is, open up a terminal and type “howdoi” followed by the query ( just like in the examples i presented above )