Mastering Essential Shell Tricks: Pipes, Redirection, and Find Commands

Pipe “|”

Use a pipe to feed the output of one command as the input of another.

Example: grep "hello" file.txt | wc -l This searches for lines containing “hello” in file.txt and counts them; the output of grep becomes the input of wc.

Redirection

Redirect command output to a file instead of the standard screen.

Common symbols: > writes to a file, overwriting it. >> appends to a file, preserving existing content.

Backslash (Escape)

Using a backslash allows the output of a command to be used as an argument for another command.

Command example: find . -mtime -1 -type f -print This finds files modified in the last 24 hours. To archive the found files you can use:

#!/bin/sh
tar -zcvf lastmod.tar.gz `find . -mtime -1 -type f -print`