Unix Shell
Updated: 06 August 2024
Searching
You can use grep
to search in a file
1grep "hello" ./hello.txt
Or recursively through a directory:
1grep -R "hello" ./hello
And using a RegEx
1grep -R ^hello
Or case inensitive with -i
or for full words with -w
You can even search for something in the output of a command using a pipe (|
)
1echo "hello world" | grep "world"
Processes
List Processes
To kill a process you can first list running processes
1lsof
To get the PID of a process you can use lsof
along with grep
, e.g. find a node
process:
1lsof | grep node
Find A Process on a Current Port
E.g for a processs running on port 4001
1lsof -i:4001
You can also just get the port by adding -t
:
1lsof -t -t:4001
Kill a Process by PID
You can kill a process using it’s PID using:
1kill 1234
Or with -9
to force
1kill -9 1234
Kill a Process by Port
You can kill a process that’s listening on a port by first getting the PID of the process with lsof -t -i:<PORT NUMBER>
and pass it into the kill
command, e.g. for port 4000
1kill $(lsof -t -i:4000)
Jobs/Background Processes
Start a process, e.g. ping
1ping google.com
The use ctrl+z
to suspend the task into the background
You can now use the terminal and start other jobs
Once jobs are running you can use jobs
to view runnning jobs:
1jobs2
3# which outputs4[1] suspended ping google.com5[2] - suspended ping other.com6[3] + suspended ping hello.com
Jobs can be resumed using fg
for the most recent job, or fg %<JOB NUMBER>
to resume a specific job
For example, resuming the ping hello.com
can be done with:
1fg %3
Navigating
You can use cd
to move to specific folders relatively
1cd ../other-folder/my-folder
Or even from the user home directory by prefixing with ~
1cd ~/my-stuff
And you can use -
to just swap back to the last directory
1# before, in apps/stuff, now in apps/something-else2cd -3# after, now in apps/something-else
Tail/Watch a file as it changes
You can get the tail of a file and watch it as it changes using:
1tail -f ./path/to/file