7 Terminal Commands That Senior Developers Use Daily (But Juniors Never Learn)

I watched a senior developer debug a production issue in 3 minutes. It would have taken me an hour. The difference? They lived in the terminal. Here are 7 commands that changed my workflow. 1. git log --oneline --graph --all Forget GUI git clients. This one command shows you: All branches visually Commit history at a glance Where branches diverge and merge # Even better, alias it: alias gl = "git log --oneline --graph --all --decorate" 2. curl -s URL | jq . Test APIs without Postman: curl -s https://api.github.com/users/octocat | jq '.name, .bio' jq is a game-changer for working with JSON. Learn it once, use it forever. 3. find . -name "*.log" -mtime +7 -delete Find and delete files older than 7 days: # Find large files find . -size +100M -type f # Find recently modified files find . -mmin -30 -type f 4. watch -n 5 command Run any command every N seconds: # Monitor disk space watch -n 5 df -h # Watch pod status watch -n 2 kubectl get pods # Monitor log file watch -n 1 "tail -5 app.log"