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Course 4 - Learning Linux Shell Scripting | Episode 2: Essential Unix/Linux Command Line Utilities and Advanced Techniques
Published 6 months, 2 weeks ago
Description
In this lesson, you’ll learn about:
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- Text & File Management Basics
- Using cat to read, display, and concatenate files, including combining stdin and file input.
- Cleaning up file output (removing blank lines, showing tabs as ^I).
- Splitting files with split (by size or line count) and csplit (by context or text match).
- Creating temporary files/directories using mktemp, stored securely in /tmp.
- Manipulating filenames via shell operators (%, %%, #, ##) to extract extensions or URL parts.
- Performing bulk renaming/moving with find, mv, and rename using regex or substitution (e.g., replacing spaces).
- Powerful Processing & Automation Tools
- find: Recursive file search by name, regex, depth (-maxdepth, -mindepth), type, timestamps (-mtime, -ctime, -newer), size, and permissions, with pruning and efficiency optimizations.
- xargs: Converts stdin into command arguments, combines with find -print0 and xargs -0 to handle filenames with spaces.
- tr: Translates or deletes characters (e.g., case conversion, newline replacements, ROT13).
- sort & uniq: Sort data numerically, alphabetically, or by key; extract or detect duplicates (requires sorted input).
- Data Integrity & Security Utilities
- Generating checksums using md5sum and sha1sum for file verification.
- Recursive checksum verification using tools like md5deep.
- Encrypting/decrypting files with crypt and gpg.
- Base64 encoding/decoding for ASCII-safe binary data conversion.
- Creating password hashes using openssl (e.g., salted shadow-style hashes).
- Terminal Environment & Workflow Optimization
- Recording command sessions using script and replaying with scriptreplay for tutorials or demos.
- Automating input via stdin redirection (echo -e "input\n" | command) and using the expect utility for interactive prompts.
- Spell-checking text using aspell or the system dictionary (/usr/share/dict/words).
- Leveraging parallelism with background jobs (&) and wait to execute multiple tasks (like md5sum) concurrently.
- Core Objective
- Mastering the Unix/Linux command line as an art, combining tools (like find + xargs + grep) into powerful pipelines to solve complex automation and processing challenges efficiently.
You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/cybercode_academy