Acquired Linux Tricks

I decided to I should keep track of random nifty tricks that I come across working with Linux. So this post will be that. Of course, it will forever be a work in progress.

1. For the first trick I’d like to add, it’s one I came across on the Heroku development platform site. It’s grabbing an installation script with wget via a URL then immediately passing it on to bash so it executes automatically as soon as it’s downloaded. Pretty handy. Here’s the sample script:wget -O- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install-ubuntu.sh | shWhat this exactly does is download the Heroku Toolbelt then install it on my Linux machine. Cool huh?

   reference: https://toolbelt.herokuapp.com/debian

Stay tuned for more tricks. Cheers!

Using grep to find files containing matching text.

grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"

• -r or -R is recursive,
• -n is line number, and
• -w stands for match the whole word.
• -l (lower-case L) can be added to just give the file name of matching files.

Along with these, --exclude, --include, --exclude-dir or --include-dir flags could be used for efficient searching:

• This will only search through those files which have .c or .h extensions:

  grep --include=\*.{c,h} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
  

• This will exclude searching all the files ending with .o extension:

grep --exclude=*.o -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"

• Just like exclude files, it’s possible to exclude/include directories through --exclude-dir and --include-dir parameter. For example, this will exclude the dirs dir1/, dir2/ and all of them matching *.dst/:

grep --exclude-dir={dir1,dir2,*.dst} -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"