Commands using grep (1,935)

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draw line separator (using knoppix5 idea)

List complete size of directories (do not consider hidden directories)
why make it complicated ? : ] -------------------- I just noticed someone else has posted this on this site before me (sorry I am now a duplicate :/) http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4313

Print a row of characters across the terminal
Pure Bash This will print a row of characters the width of the screen without using any external executables. In some cases, COLUMNS may not be set. Here is an alternative that uses tput to generate a default if that's the case. And it still avoids using tr. $ printf -v row "%${COLUMNS:-$(tput cols)}s"; echo ${row// /#} The only disadvantage to either one is that they create a variable.

connect via ssh using mac address
Connect to a machine running ssh using mac address by using the "arp" command

Squish repeated delimiters into one
This can be particularly useful used in conjunction with a following cut command like $echo "hello::::there" | tr -s ':' | cut -d':' -f2 which prints 'there'. Much easier that guessing at -f values for cut. I know 'tr -s' is used in lots of commands here already but I just figured out the -s flag and thought it deserved to be highlighted :)

split and combine different pages from different pdf's
The command shows the real power of the pdftk tool, you can do basically everything you want with multiple pdf's. In the command a book is created from chapters, headings and covers.

Validate and pretty-print JSON expressions.
You can use a site like http://www.jsonlint.com/ or use the command line to validate your long and complex json data. This is part of the simplejson package for python http://undefined.org/python/#simplejson. Wrong json expression example: $ echo '{ 1.2:3.4}' | python -m simplejson.tool Expecting property name: line 1 column 2 (char 2)

encode HTML entities
Encodes HTML entities from input (file or stdin) so it's possible to directly past the result to a blog or HTML source file.

do a full file listing of every file found with locate

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.


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