Linux tricks, one-liners & shell magic

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Community Linux tricks, one-liners & shell scripts — searchable & formatted.

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Category: text-processing — 3 trick(s)

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Count lines / words / bytes in a file
wc is the Swiss Army knife for file statistics. Combine flags or chain with other commands.
bash
$ wc -l file.txt # lines wc -w file.txt # words wc -c file.txt # bytes # Count non-empty lines: grep -c . file.txt # Total lines across multiple files: wc -l *.log | tail -1
wordcounter 2026-04-19
Text Processing
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Replace text in multiple files
Use sed with find to do a batch search-and-replace across many files at once.
bash
$ # Replace 'foo' with 'bar' in all .conf files: find /etc -name '*.conf' -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} + # Preview changes first (dry-run): grep -rl 'foo' /etc/*.conf
sedmaster 2026-04-19
File Management Text Processing
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Search inside files recursively
Use grep to search through all files in a directory tree for a pattern, showing filenames and line numbers.
bash
$ grep -rn 'search_term' /path/to/dir/ # Case-insensitive, show 2 lines of context: grep -rin -C2 'error' /var/log/
tux42 2026-04-19
File Management Text Processing
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