A few linux tips and tricks for newbies
I have made this page as a reminder of tricks I used in Linux or unix along the way
To expand a .tgz of tar.gz file in one line
gunzip < file.tar.gz | tar xvf -
gunzip < file.tgz | tar xvf -
To change both group and ownership recursively
chown -R someowner.somegroup file
To search the entire hardrive for a file in Linux
find / -name somefilename
To search on Linux within each file for some phrase on the entire harddrive and display the file and line numbers
find / -exec grep -n "phrase" '{}' \; -print
xargs can be used to create a list of input file to one of your perl scripts e.g.
ls *.txt | xargs ./your_perl_script
wc can be used to print the total bytes, words and lines in a file, combined with
cat you can print a total number of lines or byte, e.g. say you want the total number of lines in all files in the current directory ending in .txt
cat *.txt | wc -l
display a range of lines withing a file where the starting line number is x and the ending line number is y
sed -n 'x,yp' filename
vim uses A4 paper size by default to change this, use the following setting for letter size
:set printoptions=paper:letter