As Linux continues to blow my mind, I thought I better start getting down some of the commands that I’ve been finding useful before I forget them.
My Linux command posts
These posts are NOT supposed to be exhaustive documentation for the commands they cover, but are here as a reminder for myself as I’ve found them useful and my memory is terrible. If they happen to help someone else, then awesome, and if anyone wants to let me know of any more, even better.
The grep command
The grep command is used for searching text for regular expressions and returning the lines that match. The result can then be output to a new file
Why I needed it
Recently I was asked to get certain details out of a very large log file. My first thought was to open the log in Excel and start filtering away. But then a Linux loving colleague showed me the grep command.
How I used it
grep "the text I was searching for" mylogfile.log > newfile.txt
I couldn’t believe how easy and fast this made a boring task. Definitely a command I need to remember.