IBM’s DeveloperWorks has 10 Good Unix Habits, which apply to GNU/Linux at least as much as to Unix.
I would expect that most experienced admins can second-guess the content to 5-7 of these 10 points, just from the title (for example, item 1 is a reference to “mkdir -p”, plus another related syntax available to Bash users). I would be surprised if you knew all ten:
1. Make directory trees in a single swipe.
2. Change the path; do not move the archive.
3. Combine your commands with control operators.
4. Quote variables with caution.
5. Use escape sequences to manage long input.
6. Group your commands together in a list.
7. Use xargs outside of find .
8. Know when grep should do the counting — and when it should step aside.
9. Match certain fields in output, not just lines.
10. Stop piping cats.
How many did you get?
1. mkdir -p
2. wget -O /path ??
3. echo “insert into bla (bla,bla) Values (bla,bla);|mysql && echo “select bla from bla;”|mysql
4. echo “$var” ?? in bash set vars with lowcase
5. echo -e “line 1\nline2\n”
6. ??? ls /usr/local/bin
7. deborphan|xargs apt-get remove –purge -y
8. grep -c bla file
9. ???
10. Use grep instead of cat|grep ??
I don’t get the meaning in several, can you explain how to implement every one? Here are the ones that I understand
1 mkdir -p
2 ?
3 ?
4 Use doble quotes only when it´s really needed?
5 Mmmmh I understand use \n instead the enter itself, but why? what’s the difference?
6 Group… in a file and execute? or maybe use pipes?
7 Why use xargs instead find -exec
8 Detect when is usefull grep and when “grep -c”
9 awk ‘$2~/RegExp/’ instead grep “RegExp”
10 That’s classic stop using cat to pipe the output to another command
The explanations are in the IBM article; for example, 2 is about the “tar -C /path” syntax…