category 10 / 10

Shell tricks

History, aliases, brace expansion, and shortcuts that save keystrokes.

005

entries

4 min

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all 005 scripting 003 read 001 here-strings 001 ifs 001 pipestatus 001 pipefail 001 exit-codes 001 parameter-expansion 001 paths 001 filenames 001 process-substitution 001 diff 001 comm 001 type 001 aliases 001 debugging 001

046Split a line into named variables without losing them to a subshellIFS=, read -r date region product units revenue <<< "$(sed -n 2p sales.csv)"; echo "$region $units"2026-10-224 min 036Find out which stage of a pipeline actually failedgrep FATAL server.log | wc -l; echo "${PIPESTATUS[@]}"2026-10-054 min 029Pull the filename, directory, or extension out of a path without basenamep=/var/log/nginx/access.log.2.gz; echo "${p##*/} ${p%/*} ${p%.*} ${p##*.}"2026-09-244 min 015Compare the output of two commands without writing a temp filediff <(sort packages-web01.txt) <(sort packages-web02.txt)2026-09-034 min 011Find out what a command actually is before you run ittype -a grep2026-08-283 min

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