Shell commands

1 minute read

See Bash Scripting Cheatsheet for a whole collection of bash tricks.

Logging

Pipe data to a log file and stdout:

somecommand 2>&1 | tee logfile.txt

Reading the log file with shell colors:

less -R logfile.txt

Split a large logfile.txt into smaller logs, 1000 lines each:

split -l 1000 logfile.txt split

Finding

To find a file with a particular name, use:

find <searchroot> -name filename

Using $(pwd) lets us search the current directory.

find $(pwd) -name myfile.txt

Grep filtering

Use -A <N> and -B <N> to show <N> lines of information after or before the searched text.

This is useful when automating tasks or executing tests. For example, in golang we can invoke tests to run many times using the count command. In golang, concurrency test bugs can be sniffed out by running a test many times. If we want to run the test TestThis 1000 times, but only show failures, we can use:

go test -run=TestThis -v -count=1000 | grep -B 3 FAIL

Disk usage

To display overall system disk usage (note: -h for human readable):

df -h

To display disk usage of the current folder (note: -s for simplify):

du -hs $(pwd)

To display disk usage of all subdirectories:

du -h $(pwd)

Multiple execution

Found on askubuntu

A; B    # Run A and then B, regardless of success of A
A && B  # Run B if and only if A succeeded
A || B  # Run B if and only if A failed
A &     # Run A in background.

SSH

To avoid entering a passphrase each time you use ssh, add the following to ~/.bashrc:

alias sshlogin='eval $(ssh-agent); ssh-add ~/.ssh/<key_file>`

Use sshlogin to only need to enter the passphrase once.