Other topics and exercises

This page is a placeholder to cover tools that we do not normally teach in our Linux command line introduction but we would like to mention as we find them useful. Also, over the years we taught a number of webinars on advanced bash that you can watch at any time.

Fuzzy finder

Fuzzy finder fzf is a third-party tool, not installed by default. With basic usage, it does interactive processing of standard input. At a more advanced level (not covered in the video below), it provides key bindings and fuzzy completion.

You can watch a video for this topic after the workshop.

Question 11.1

Let’s study together these commands:

$ source ~/projects/def-sponsor00/shared/fzf/.fzf.bash
$ kill -9 `/bin/ps aux | fzf | awk '{print $2}'`
 

Additional topics

If there is interest, we could explore some other topics in the future:

  • Bash arithmetics
  • Permissions
  • How to control processes
  • GNU Parallel

Bash webinars

Our 2022 webinar Lesser known but very useful Bash features covers running commands in a subshell, subsetting string variables, Bash arrays, modifying separators with IFS, running Python code from inside self-contained Bash functions, editing your command history, running unaliased versions of commands, handy use of bracket expansion, and a few other topics.

More exercises

  1. Find all files in a directory hierarchy that have a matching substring inside, and run ls -l on these files.
  2. Same, but replace this string with another substring in all these matching files.
  3. List all files in a directory (passed as an argument), printing only their name, size, and the MD5 checksum.
  4. List ten largest files in a directory (passed as an argument).