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POMost powerful examples of Unix commands or scripts every programmer should know
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copied!<p>There are many things that all programmers should know, but I am particularly interested in the Unix/Linux commands that we should all know. For accomplishing tasks that we may come up against at some point such as <strong>refactoring</strong>, <strong>reporting</strong>, <strong>network updates</strong> etc.</p> <p>The reason I am curious is because having previously worked as a software tester at a software company while I am studying my degree, I noticed that all of developers (who were developing Windows software) had 2 computers.</p> <p>To their left was their Windows XP development machine, and to the right was a Linux box. I think it was Ubuntu. Anyway they told me that they used it because it provided powerful unix operations that Windows couldn't do in their development process.</p> <p>This makes me curious to know, as a software engineer what do you believe are some of the most powerful scripts/commands/uses that you can perform on a Unix/Linux operating system that every programmer should know for solving real world tasks that may not necessarily relate to writing code?</p> <p>We all know what <strong>sed</strong>, <strong>awk</strong> and <strong>grep</strong> do. I am interested in some actual Unix/Linux scripting pieces that have solved a difficult problem for you, so that other programmers may benefit. Please provide your story and source.</p> <p>I am sure there are numerous examples like this that people keep in their '<strong>Scripts</strong>' folder.</p> <p><strong>Update:</strong> People seem to be misinterpreting the question. I am not asking for the names of individual unix commands, rather UNIX code <strong>snippets</strong> that have solved a problem for you.</p> <h2>Best answers from the Community</h2> <hr> <p><strong>Traverse a directory tree and print out paths to any files that match a regular expression:</strong></p> <pre><code>find . -exec grep -l -e 'myregex' {} \; >> outfile.txt </code></pre> <p><strong>Invoke the default editor(Nano/ViM)</strong> </p> <blockquote> <p>(works on most Unix systems including Mac OS X) Default editor is whatever your "<strong>EDITOR</strong>" environment variable is set to. ie: <strong>export EDITOR=/usr/bin/pico</strong> which is located at <strong>~/.profile</strong> under Mac OS X.</p> </blockquote> <pre><code>Ctrl+x Ctrl+e </code></pre> <p><strong>List all running network connections (including which app they belong to)</strong></p> <pre><code>lsof -i -nP </code></pre> <p><strong>Clear the Terminal's search history</strong> (Another of my favourites)</p> <pre><code>history -c </code></pre>

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