Most powerful examples of Unix commands or scripts every programmer should know

Question

There are many things that all programmers should know, but I am particularly interested in the Unix/Linux commands that we should all know. For accomplishing tasks that we may

Answer 1

Best answers from the Community

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Traverse a directory tree and print out paths to any files that match a regular expression:

find . -exec grep -l -e 'myregex' {} \; >> outfile.txt 

Invoke the default editor(Nano/ViM)

(works on most Unix systems including Mac OS X) Default editor is whatever your "EDITOR" environment variable is set to. ie: export EDITOR=/usr/bin/pico which is located at ~/.profile under Mac OS X.

Ctrl+x Ctrl+e

List all running network connections (including which app they belong to)

lsof -i -nP

Clear the Terminal's search history (Another of my favourites)

history -c

Answer 2

How to exit VI

:wq

Saves the file and ends the misery.

Alternative of ":wq" is ":x" to save and close the vi editor.

Answer 3

You would be better of if you keep a cheatsheet with you... there is no single command that can be termed most useful. If a perticular command does your job its useful and powerful

Edit you want powerful shell scripts? shell scripts are programs. Get the basics right, build on individual commands and youll get what is called a powerful script. The one that serves your need is powerful otherwise its useless. It would have been better had you mentioned a problem and asked how to solve it.

Answer 4

If you make a typo in a long command, you can rerun the command with a substitution (in bash):

mkdir ~/aewseomeDirectory

you can see that "awesome" is mispelled, you can type the following to re run the command with the typo corrected

^aew^awe

it then outputs what it substituted (mkdir ~/aweseomeDirectory) and runs the command. (don't forget to undo the damage you did with the incorrect command!)

Answer 5

You can do anything with this...

gcc

Answer 6

some of you might disagree with me, but nevertheless, here's something to talk about. If one learns gawk ( other variants as well) throughly, one can skip learning and using grep/sed/wc/cut/paste and a few other *nix tools. all you need is one good tool to do the job of many combined.