mac terminal commands for working with text files

Given its minimal user interface-just a blank screen and a blinking cursor-the command line is intimidating to newcomers. With a little practice most developers find that the command line is actually a faster and more powerful way to navigate and control a computer. A typical user will never need to use the command line but software developers do because certain tasks can only be done with it: running programs, installing software, using Git for version control, or connecting to servers in the cloud. It is an alternative to the mouse or finger-based graphical user interface familiar to most computer users. If you have ever seen a show where hackers are furiously typing into a black window, that's the command line. Terminal displays only the final results of the two commands combined.The command line is a powerful text-only interface for computers.

The first part of the command looks for the word Walden in any files in the current directory, and the second runs another grep command on the results of the first command. You’d use this command: grep Walden * | grep Pond.

Say you want to find files containing both Walden and Pondon the same line. Using the pipe ( |), a Unix redirection operator, you can tell grep to search for more than one string. (Note that you can also combine options-for instance, grep -rl Walden searches subfolders and returns only a list of files containing the word Walden. Get started with the helpful options listed here. The grep command has several options that let you fine-tune the way you search for text, as well as the kind of results grep returns. Returns the names of files containing Walden and the number of hits in each file. Finds Walden in any file in any subfolder of ~/Documents.įinds only live does not find liver, lives, lived, and so on.įinds files containing Walden, but returns only a list of file names.

Mac terminal commands for working with text files