Getting started in GCP

joshua_jebaraj — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 13:44:09 +0000

Essential Linux Command For Developers

joshua_jebaraj — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 22:28:54 +0000

Introduction

In this tutorial, I am going to share basic Linux commands that we can use to edit the text file. One can ask why we should use the Linux tools where we can use IDE which is more powerful than Linux tools.

In servers, you don't have GUI in that case you have to work with the CLI
You can with CLI text editor like vim or nano but working with CLI tools makes you more efficient
Makes you look cool in front of your friends

Outcomes

By end of the article you will understand the basic linux cli tools to work with the text file

Printing the content

There are ton of tools to print the content of the file lets see some of the common and popular cli tools

Cat

cat command used to print the content of the file

Usage

$ cat file-name

There are some more flag that you can use along with cat to make cat more powerful

$ cat -n file-name

The above command will print the content of the file with line number

tac

tac command is the same as a cat but prints the content in the reverse order

Usage

$ tac file-name

head

Imagine you have 100 lines of code you want to see the beginning of the file In this case head command comes in hand

Usage

$ head <file-name>

If you want to print up to a particular number of lines you can use the head command with n flag

$ head -n 5 file-name

The above command prints. the first 5 line of the file

Tail

Tail command used to print the last part of the file

$ tail file-name

Similar to head you can combine with the n flag

$ tail -n 5 file-name

prints the last 5 lines of the file

more command is similar to the cat

Usage

$ more <file-name>

To show only 10 lines per page you can use the below command

$ more -10 <file-name>

The main disadvantage of the more command is you can't scroll up

less

less is similar to the more.But it's more efficient because because it doesn't load the whole file in the go

Usage

$ less <file-name>

Searching

To search for the particular string in the file we can use grep

Usage

$ grep <string> <file-name>

We can combine with the -i flag to ignore the case

$ grep -i <string> <file>

Find and Replace

To find and replace the string in the file we can use sed command

sed -i '/s/<text-to-be-searched>/<text-to-be-replaced>/' filename

To replace all occurrences

sed -i '/s/<text-to-be-searched>/<text-to-be-replaced>/g' filename

Conclusion

In this article, I have covered basic Linux CLI tools that you can use to edit the text file . If you have any more feedback or have any question let me know via Twitter

DEV Community: joshua_jebaraj

Getting started in GCP

Essential Linux Command For Developers

Introduction

Outcomes

Printing the content

Cat

tac

head

Tail

more

less

Searching

Find and Replace

Conclusion