B.10. Miscellaneous Tools

B.9. Searching and Sorting

You can use the following tools to search and sort files:

egrep

Extended version of grep.

fgrep

Searches files for literal words.

find

Searches the system for filenames.

grep

Searches files for text patterns.

locate

Faster version of find; however, it depends on a database that is periodically updated by the weekly periodic job. If the database is out of date, find is more accurate.

sort

Sorts a file (use -n for numeric sorting and -u to eliminate duplicates).

strings

Searches binary files for text patterns.

uniq

Reports or filters duplicate lines in a file.

unzip

Extracts files from a Zip archive.

zgrep

Searches compressed files for text patterns.

zip

Creates a Zip archive.