This post is as much for myself as it is for anyone else and I will update it whenever I come across anything that I find that is worth including. The below are all of the cool little bash commands for linux/unix that I have stumbled across.

Variables

$ variable=$(git describe --tags)
$ echo "version is $variable"
version is 0.15.0

Here Docs

Input stream which sends the text in each line to a process until a line is reached which contains only the delimiter (ENDOFSTRING in the example below).

$ cat << ENDOFSTRING
  This is a here doc
  It will write every line to the file
  until a line with only ENDOFSTRING
  ENDOFSTRING
This is a here doc
It will write every line to the file
until a line with on ENDOFSTRING

Translate

Transforms or deletes characters in a string.

$ echo "hello there" | tr a-z A-Z
HELLO THERE
$ echo "edward woodward" | tr -d "d"
ewar woowar

As mentioned above, I will keep updating this one. I expect I'll update the date each time to keep bumping it up the list. I'm also planning on starting a similar reference list of Vim commands :)

Cat

Concatenates files. In addition to writing a file to stdout, cat can also write to a file. Use cat with redirect ( > ) to the file you want to write to, write your message then ctrl-d to exit:

$cat > file1.txt
Hello from file 2
$cat > file2.txt
Hello from file 2
cat file1.txt file2.txt > file3.txt
cat file3.txt
Hello from file 2
Hello from file 2

Links

Creates a hard link to a file in another location. Use the -s switch to make it a soft link (also called a symbolic link or symlink for short) to a file in another location:

ln -s target_path link_path

The files that you see on your filesystem are just pointers to something called an inode which is where the data is actually stored internally. A hard link is another pointer which points to the same inode. A soft link creates a new inode which references the original inode. This is an important distinction to make because deleting a hard link will delete the actual inode whereas deleting a soft link (symlink) does not affect the original file.

Tar

Compresses a directory or files(s).

tar -czvf name-of-archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory-or-file

The c switch signifies we want to create an archive, z says we want to use gzip to compress the file(s), v is verbose and f indicates that the following text will be the name of the filename we want to create. To unzip a tarball it is the same syntax as above except the c (create) switch is replaced with x for extract:

tar -xzvf archive.tar.gz

SSH

Securely connect to a remote host.

ssh your_username@remote_host_domain_or_ip_address

SCP

Secure copy files from remote host to local host or vice-versa. It uses SSH with the same level of security to transfer the files.

scp foobar.txt your_username@remotehost:/some/remote/directory

Reverse the order of the arguments to copy in the other direction.

Find

Recursively searches directories to find files.

find /start/dir -name "something.*"