My Favorite bash Tips and Tricks

and neither does this one:

find -name test.sh 2>&1 > /tmp/output.txt

I started this discussion on output redirection using the find command as an example, and all the examples used the find command. This discussion isn't limited to the output of find, however. Many other commands can generate enough error messages to obscure the one or two lines of output you need.

Output redirection isn't limited to bash, either. All UNIX/Linux shells support output redirection using the same syntax.

One of the greatest features of the bash shell is command history, which makes it easy to navigate through past commands by navigating up and down through your history with the up and down arrow keys. This is fine if the command you want to repeat is within the last 10–20 commands you executed, but it becomes tedious when the command is 75–100 commands back in your history.

To speed things up, you can search interactively through your command history by pressing Ctrl-R. After doing this, your prompt changes to:

(reverse-i-search)`':

Start typing a few letters of the command you're looking for, and bash shows you the most recent command that contains the string you've typed so far. What you type is shown between the ` and ' in the prompt. In the example below, I typed in htt:

(reverse-i-search)`htt': rpm -ql $(rpm -qa | grep httpd)

This shows that the most recent command I typed containing the string htt is:

rpm -ql $(rpm -qa | grep httpd)

To execute that command again, I can press Enter. If I want to edit it, I can press the left or right arrow key. This places the command on the command line at a normal prompt, and I now can edit it as if I just typed it in. This can be a real time saver for commands with a lot of arguments that are far back in the command history.

One last tip I'd like to offer is using loops from the command line. The command line is not the place to write complicated scripts that include multiple loops or branching. For small loops, though, it can be a great time saver. Unfortunately, I don't see many people taking advantage of this. Instead, I frequently see people use the up arrow key to go back in the command history and modify the previous command for each iteration.

If you are not familiar with creating for loops or other types of loops, many good books on shell scripting discuss this topic. A discussion on for loops in general is an article in itself.

You can write loops interactively in two ways. The first way, and the method I prefer, is to separate each line with a semicolon. A simple loop to make a backup copy of all the files in a directory would look like this:

$ for file in * ; do cp $file $file.bak; done

Another way to write loops is to press Enter after each line instead of inserting a semicolon. bash recognizes that you are creating a loop from the use of the for keyword, and it prompts you for the next line with a secondary prompt. It knows you are done when you enter the keyword done, signifying that your loop is complete:

$ for file in *
> do cp $file $file.bak
> done

When I originally conceived this article, I was going to name it “Stupid bash Tricks”, and show off some unusual, esoteric bash commands I've learned. The tone of the article has changed since then, but there is one stupid bash trick I'd like to share.

About five years ago, a Linux system I was responsible for ran out of memory. Even simple commands, such as ls, failed with an insufficient memory error. The obvious solution to this problem was simply to reboot. One of the other system administrators wanted to look at a file that may have held clues to the problem, but he couldn't remember the exact name of the file. We could switch to different directories, because the cd command is part of bash, but we couldn't get a list of the files, because even ls would fail. To get around this problem, the other system administrator created a simple loop to show us the files in the directory:

$ for file in *; do echo $file; done

This worked when ls wouldn't, because echo is a part of the bash shell, so it already is loaded into memory. It's an interesting solution to an unusual problem. Now, can anyone suggest a way to display the contents of a file using only bash built-ins?