What's the one Linux command you wish you knew years ago?

Post by slug » Sun, Nov 20, 2011, 4:22 PM UTC

huskyr wrote: post #76

p9idf wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many comments seem to be shell- and bash-related. Perhaps the thread exposes how difficult to read the bash manpage is. On my system, the bash 4.1 manpage is 41026 words long, or about 80 pages. Manpages are most useful to me when they are short and to-the-point so I can find what I am looking for before I lose interest in skimming through an 80 page book.

I'm baffled all the time by the lack of clear examples on many manpages.

Post by owenmarshall » Sun, Nov 20, 2011, 4:27 PM UTC

bnegreve wrote: post #31

geekytenny wrote: post #29

This is useful for finding and killing a process. ps -A | grep some text in program name upon getting the pid kill -9 pid

also check killall programname

Post by ajays » Sun, Nov 20, 2011, 4:35 PM UTC

caw wrote: post #83

cop359 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know a lot about this stuff, but my understanding is that Perl was more or less replaced sed and awk.

I code in Perl at my day job, and I still use awk and grep. Sometimes it's quicker to do it in awk than perl, especially when you're doing it in command line and have to figure out quotes. awk -F, '{print $3}' foo | xargs -I{} echo 'command -x -y -z {}' perl -e 'open F, " ) { my($a,$b,$c,@rest) =split /,/; system("command -x -y -z $c"); }' I think I could do the split into an array and then take the third element, bu…

   perl -lane 'system("command -x -y -z $F[2]")' foo

Post by sjs » Sun, Nov 20, 2011, 4:41 PM UTC

PascalW wrote: post #46

Not really a command but this: mv /path/to/some/file.{jpg,png} Has been a huge timesaver. It's the same as mv /path/to/some/file.jpg /path/to/some/file.png But saves you the typing/copy pasting the path for the second argument. Can also be used with cp etc.

Post by sjs » Sun, Nov 20, 2011, 4:45 PM UTC

Aissen wrote: post #106

!$ (short for !!:$) Passes last argument on the command line. In general, the whole paragraph on HISTORY EXPANSION in the bash manual is a must read. A few ones from the moreutils package: - vipe : manually edit the data in the middle of a pipe. - vidir : treat a directory and its files as a text file. Does renames and deletions. - sponge : when you're doing modification on a file in a pipe, and want the output to be…