CLI Magic: One-liners    Monday, March 21 2005 @ 05:00 PM EST Contributed by: glosser Linux.com presents the next tutorial in their command-line series. This one is on apropos and grep. Newcomers to Linux often feel overwhelmed by the number of commands at their disposal. Frustration sets in when they know what they wish to accomplish, but they do not have any idea what command(s) they can use to get the job done. This week's CLI Magic -- written by Jim Westbrook -- helps clear away some of that excess one-liner at a time. Fortunately, Linux provides a couple of utilitites which use a database of the man pages to point them to an appropriate command or provide a hint of what a command does. These are apropos and whatis respectively. An example may be the best illustration of their use. First one for apropos: ~/> apropos music SDL::Music (3pm) - a perl extension tse3play (1) - play/convert music files (MIDI or TSE3MDL) using the TSE3 sequencer engine library The output results are not particularly useful if what the user desires is to learn how to play a music CD on his system. The next logical step is to call apropos again, this time looking for the string "CD" instead of music. Alas, the result of this request returns 76 lines which is almost as overwhelming as the full list of commands in /bin. What the user needs is a way to limit the results to only those items that include the word "play" in the description. Thankfully, Linux provides just such a tool -- grep. Full tutorial   [ Views: 1350 ]

CLI Magic: One-liners | 0 comments | Create New Account

Newest First Oldest First Flat Nested No Comments Threaded

The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.

No user comments.