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onceupon/bash-oneliner

10,730Audience · developerComplexity · 1/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A practical reference collection of short bash commands covering text processing, file operations, networking, and system management, gathered from real bioinformatics and cloud computing work.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    Topics Covered
      Text search grep
      Stream editing sed awk
      File and loop commands
      Network and downloads
    System Topics
      Hardware info queries
      Resource management
      Date and time tricks
    Reference Format
      Ubuntu and Amazon Linux
      Mac compatibility
      Inline comments included
    Who It Helps
      Terminal beginners
      Linux power users
      Bioinformatics workers
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Look up a ready-made bash one-liner for text manipulation or file processing tasks

USE CASE 2

Learn terminal keyboard shortcuts and shell tricks to speed up everyday command-line work

USE CASE 3

Find bash patterns for bioinformatics data processing using tools like grep, sed, and awk

USE CASE 4

Discover network and system administration commands for Linux and macOS

Tech stack

Bashgrepsedawk

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

In plain English

This is a collection of short, practical bash commands and terminal tricks that the author gathered while working in bioinformatics and cloud computing. Bash is the command-line environment found on Linux and Mac systems, and these are the kinds of commands that let you do in one line what might otherwise take a small script. The collection covers a wide range of everyday tasks, organized into clear sections. The sections include terminal keyboard shortcuts, working with variables and string manipulation, doing arithmetic in the shell, searching through text with grep, editing text streams with sed and awk, processing lists of files with find and xargs, writing loops and conditions, downloading files, handling dates and time, working with random data, managing system resources, querying hardware information, network commands, and data processing tasks. Each entry shows the command and, in most cases, a short inline comment explaining what it does or what the output looks like. The author wrote the guide while primarily using Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, RedHat, CentOS, and Mac. Some commands may behave differently or not work on other systems. The guide is informal and honest about its origins: most examples came from web searches and Stack Overflow, and the author welcomes corrections and additions from anyone who has useful commands to contribute. This is purely a reference document, not software you install. You can read it directly on GitHub or on the linked website version which has slightly nicer formatting. It is well suited to anyone who uses a Linux or Mac terminal regularly and wants a handy reference, or to beginners who are just learning what the command line can do. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I need to search through a large text file and extract lines matching a pattern using grep. Show me the most useful grep flags for filtering and formatting output based on common bash patterns.
Prompt 2
I want to process a CSV file in bash using awk to sum values in a specific column. Give me a one-liner for this task.
Prompt 3
I'm working on Ubuntu and need to download files, check system resources, and manage processes from the terminal. What are the essential bash one-liners for each task?
Prompt 4
How do I use xargs and find together in bash to run a command on every file in a directory that matches a pattern?
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