Learning Linux Things

6/14/20

Recently I installed the Linux Lite operating system onto my computer. My hardware is a tad old and was getting quite slow with all the Windows overhead, and it was time for a change. I’ve been using the terminal a lot and really love just messing around inside the command line. One specific thing I’ve learned how to do is move files that match a certain pattern to another location very quickly. Lets say I have the following file structure:

myFolder/
cat_names
dog_names
snakenames

My goal is to move the cat_names and dog_names files to myFolder/. I can match the file names using a regex and then pipe them to xargs in order to do this:

$ find -regex ".*_names" | xargs -I '{}' mv {} test/

This might not seem very helpful, but imagine if I had hundreds or even thousands of files that matched that pattern. Plus it’s just kind of cool.

Another thing that I’ve learned about is grep. Let’s say I need to search through all the files in the test/ folder and I want to locate where I used the word “baseball”. I can do the following:

$ grep "baseball" -r

Which outputs

names:Anthony: baseball
names:Sam: baseball
scores:baseball scores:

This means that the names and scores files both contain the word baseball.

I’ve also installed a package called unclutter which hides my mouse cursor after a certain number of seconds.