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Advanced

Some advanced things

Pipes & direction​

| is called pipe symbol.

ls | less: take output from ls and send it to input of less. So that you can easily browse through file list.

grep string file: search for string in file and print only those lines.

Some examples

Let say I have a csv file that includes details of films that nominated Oscars:

  1. I want extract all the films that are in 1978 in order.
  • First I find all the lines that has "1978": grep 1978 oscars.tsv
  • Then I continue to sort: grep 1978 oscars.tsv | sort
  • Then I want to save it to another file: grap 1978 oscars.tsv | sort > 1978films.txt
  1. I want to know how many films received 4 Oscars. Suppose 3rd column is number of Oscar film received.
  • Cut the 3rd column of every line and print it: cut -f 3 oscars.tsv
  • Find 4: cut -f 3 oscars.tsv | grep 4
  • Count how many of them: cut -f 3 oscars.tsv | grep 4 | wc -l (wc means word count, -l is for line)

Wildcards​

Wildcards is the star or asterisk that bash will replace with the name of all files in the current directory.

For example:

  • ls a*: list all files start with "a".
  • ls *a: list all files end with "a".
  • ls *ab*: list all files contain "ab".
  • grep ab *: search "ab" in all files.
  • echo *: (echo is just simply echo what you type), bash will replace "*" with all the files in the directory.
  • mv *txt textFolder: move all txt file to textFolder

Superuser do​

Some command that not allowed to run. To run it add sudo at the beginning.

Customization​

There are many files is used for customization. All these files should be placed at home directory.

Bash:

  • .profile read on login -> should use for config variable
  • .bashrc read for interactive shells -> should use for running commands, aliases

Zsh:

  • .zshenv read always
  • .zshrc read fir interactive shells

Variables​

export SOMEVAR=some_value

Usually to not set this everytime you start shell, you should put it in a .zshenv file. For bash, it is .profile.

$ nano .zshenv
$ export EDITOR=nano

PATH is a path variable indicate where to look for the commands. If it doesn't exist, shell will tell the command cannot be found.

To see the value, use echo and $.

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:

This means that when you use command like grep for e.g., the shell will go to /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin: to find that command to execute.

Let's say we have helloworld program in bin folder. Using like this won't work:

$ helloworld
zsh: command not found: helloworld

$ bin/helloworld # path from the home directory to the executable file
# executes the file
Hello, World!

To make it easier, you can add bin to the PATH variable.

$ export PATH=$PATH:~/bin # extend the $PATH variable with bin, colon as separator

# now you can use helloworld from everywhere
$ helloworld
Hello, World!

Aliases​

In macOS, the ls list does not show any colors. To do it, you have to use ls -G.

Or you can simply put alias:

$ alias ls="ls -G"
$ ls
# show files in colors

Community​

Check out the documentations of bash and zsh.

Check out ohmyz.sh.