Commands using grep (1,935)

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Random number generation within a range N, here N=10

Recursively remove directory with many files quickly
rsync'ing an empty directory over a directory to be deleted recursively is much faster than using rm -rf, for various reasons. Relevant only for directories with really a lot of files.

Annotate tail -f with timestamps
Uses the command ts in order to add a timestamp on each line. This command is provided in the moreutils package on Debian, and you may need libtime-duration-perl to be able to format the date.

find which lines in a file are longer than N characters
Filter out lines of input that contain 72, or fewer, characters. This uses bash only. ${#i} is the number of characters in variable i.

Find the package that installed a command

recursive remove all htm files

Display a list of RPMs installed on a particular date
Find out which RPMs were installed on a particular date. These would (naturally) include update RPMs. This example shows searching for "Thu 05 Mar" (with grep). Alternatively, pipe it to less so you can search inside less (with less's neat text highlighting of the search term): rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} \"%{vendor}\" %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | less # (this example) search term: Thu 05 Mar

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

convert ascii string to hex
Even adds a newline.

Tar - Compress by excluding folders
If you give tar a list of filenames, it will not add the directories, so if you don't care about directory ownership or permissions, you can save some space. Tar will create directories as necessary when extracting. This command is limited by the maximum supported size of the argument list, so if you are trying to tar up the whole OS for instance, you may just get "Argument list too long".


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