Summary

In this chapter, you added to your collection of shell skills that will ultimately help you to become productive at the Linux command line. You learned to group files for issuing commands and otherwise working with them efficiently. You also learned commands for finding files, file types, and specific words or word patterns in files quickly and easily. You learned two ways to hook commands together to save time, effort, and disk space.

Along the way, you learned the following new commands, keystrokes, and special characters for use at the shell prompt:

• > redirects standard output to a new file.

• >> appends standard output to an existing file.

• find searches for files in real time.

• grep searches a file for a particular piece of text or pattern in a plaintext file or searches a set of files for a particular piece of text or pattern and returns their filenames if they contain it.

• locate searches an often-updated database of files for the file you seek.

You've now had all the shell, command, and console education you really need to begin doing real work. Until the advanced shell topics in Chapter 25, "Harnessing the Power of the Shell," you won't explore this many nuts-and-bolts type topics again; instead, it's time to proceed to using some powerful shell-based applications.