Popular `file manipulation` terminal commands
Delete all lines that contain a specific string from a text file
Deletes all lines from a text file that contain a specific string. Pass the `-i` flag to modify the file in place.
Authored by: SiegeX
Delete empty lines in a file
Deletes all lines that contain only whitespace from a file.
Authored by: Kent
Insert a line at a specific line number
Inserts a line of text into a specific line number of a file using sed. The `-i` flag indicates the file is modified in place.
Authored by: glenn jackman
Print the nth line of a file
Uses sed to print the the the nth line of a file. This is faster than most other solutions since `NUMq` immediately quits when the line number is hit.
Authored by: anubhava
Recursively find and replace within a directory
Replaces all occurrences of a string recursively within a directory
Authored by: Anatoly
Recursively search through files that match an extension
Recursively searches all the files that end in `extension` for the term `search_term`.
Authored by: HoldOffHunger
Remove the first line of a text file
Removes the first line line of a file using tail. Tail defaults to printing the first `x-1` lines, so `+2` indicates it should skip the first line.
Authored by: Aaron Digulla
Replace newline with a space in a file
Replaces all newlines with a space, by using the `tr` command.
Authored by: dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
Sort a file by line length
Sorts a text file by line length (including spaces). The `-s` flag indicates that any lines that are the same length are kept in the relative order that they occurred in the input.
Sum all numbers in a file
Uses awk to sum all the numbers in a file. This command is also resilient to big numbers since it internally converts each number to a string.
Authored by: devnull