[nkangoh]

A friend of mine has been trying to get me to learn awk, sed, perl or grep. Honestly I only have the patience for one at the moment, which do you think is the best (taking the ease of learning into account)?

[seanp2k2]

IMO ack is a useful complement to grep if you do development: http://beyondgrep.com

Also, for general bash stuff, these are great, and IMO much better than the TLDP site that always ranks high on Google:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/doku.php

[jibberia]

Learn grep. If you're familiar with using a shell, it'll be the most immediately useful.

# search current and all child directories for files containing "bananas", case insensitive $ grep -ir "bananas" .

[scarecrowbob]

here's an example of the first useful grep I learned :

history | grep "git push"

[JetSpiegel]

Just use Ctrl-R in bash to search backwards in the history

[scarecrowbob]

I didn't know you could do that, so it's good to have an option- thanks.

But how do you then pipe that to tail? :D

[JetSpiegel]

You don't, it's a readline thing, it doesn't really generate a file you can manipulate. (I expect to be proven wrong with some insane one-liner though).

What you can do is press Ctrl-R again and it will search the older match. There's also forward match but I can't recall the shortcut.

[jpwgarrison]

I alias "history | grep" to "hrep" and I'd bet it is one of my top 3-5 commands.

[spdustin]

Why not find out:

  history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

[jakupovic]

uniq seems a bit easier to understand here:

history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

[scarecrowbob]

:D HA! Nice!

2936 git 1166 cd 409 ll 343 ssh 302 l 279 vagrant 223 ls 201 la 151 cat 140 mkdir

[barrkel]

Why not use C-r?

[aaren]

This could change your life:

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

It's a fuzzy searcher for Ctrl-r that shows all possible results, updating as you type.

[jpwgarrison]

Sometimes that is what I want, but usually I want a list of all the iterations of something to cut/paste/adjust.