Shell Commands

Aug 8, 2021

This is a note on some of the commands I have found useful and want to remember.

Setting the default shell

List all available shells, then set the default shell with chsh

cat /etc/shells

# Example output:
# /bin/bash
# /bin/csh
# /bin/dash
# /bin/ksh
# /bin/sh
# /bin/tcsh
# /bin/zsh

chsh -s /bin/zsh

popd and pushd

• can use to create a directory ‘stack’
• pushd pushes the new directory to the stack, e.g., pushd ~/directory/another/andanother/ and moves into that directory
• then popd takes you back to the previous directory in the stack.
• popd +0 prints the stack (current directory first)
• popd +1 takes you to second directory in stack.

Exclamation mark !

A very useful command! I mainly just use the first two points below a lot.

• double exclamation !!: re-run previous command
• exclamation plus number !500 run the ‘500th’ command from history
• exclamation plus a few characters !pa runs the recent command matching that pacman -Sy or whatever
• any of the above followed by colon ‘p’ !!:p prints the command instead of running it.
• exclamation with dollar sign !$ use argument of previous command.
  • E.g., say you create a file touch filename then, if you run vim !$ it will open that file in vim. Useful for very long filenames/arguments.
  • The $ represents the last argument of previous command. For example: ping google.com -c 4
    • echo !$ will print 4
    • echo !^ will print the first argument instead (google.com)
    • echo !* will print all the arguments (google.com -c 4)
  • to get a specific number argument, you first ‘select’ the command, then use colon+number. E.g.:
    • ping google.com -c 4
    • echo !!:2 returns -c if it was the previously run command. Alternatively, use !pi, !389 (the history number), etc.
    • Also, you can use ranges: echo !!:2-4
  • Also, you can ‘find and replace’ text in a command using ^ e.g.,
    • Say you run ping googl.com -c 4
    • You can correct the error in ‘googl’ with ^googl^google this automatically re-runs the command.

tail

Useful for long log files, etc.

# Show last 8 lines in file:
    tail -n 8 path/to/file

# Print a file from a specific line number:
    tail -n +8 path/to/file

# Show last `count` lines in a file and refresh every =seconds" seconds:
    tail -n count -s seconds -f path/to/file

Find & Replace across multiple files

grep -rl "target_string" . | xargs sed -i 's/target_string/new_string/g'

What is happening:

grep -rl: search recursively, and only print the files that contain “old_string” xargs: take the output of the grep command and make it the input of the next command (ie, the sed command) sed -i ‘s/old_string/new_string/g’: search and replace, within each file, old_string by new_string

Alternative: I used this to replace all the footer email links in my blog directory. Seemed to work perfectly. The section included with find makes sure to skip the git directory.

find . \( -type d -name .git -prune \) -o -type f -print0 | \
    xargs -0 sed -i 's/target_string/new_string/g'

less - Exclude Lines from View

Once your file is open in less (or journalctl) press the following keys:

• &
• !
• “your-exclude-keyword”

Ampersand opens the pattern matching mode, exclamation mark tells less to exclude the following part, and then you enter your search term.

shuf

Shuffle lines

shuf /path/file

shuf --input-range=1-100

# Random number between 1 and 100
shuf --input-range=1-100 | head -1

sort

sorts alphabetically, use -n flag for numeric sorting.

• -r for reverse order
• -f ignore case
• -t to designate field separator
• -u unique sorting - only sort unique lines.
• -o output (to file, for example)
• -R random sorting, but groups identical keys

For example:

sort /path/file

# Sort using only unique lines
sort -u /path/file

# Sort a file in place (overwrite)
sort -o /path/file /path/file

uniq

Print unique lines.

• -u only return unique lines
• -d only return duplicated lines
• -c provide ‘count’ for how many times lines occur

Processes

Some of my most used commands

• kill (process id)
• pgrep (search term) find process by search term
• killall (search term) kill processes by search term
• pstree
• setsid - spawn a detached child process

Disk Usage

• df -h: filesystem disk usage (in human readable format)
• du -h /path/dir/: usage for file/directory