Linux 2

Question 1

How would you copy a single file?

Answer 1

Call the cp command with two arguments, the source file you want to copy and the target file you want to copy it to.

Question 2

What happens if you use the cp command with a directory as the target?

Answer 2

You will end up with a copy of the source file inside of the named directory.

Question 3

How can you copy multiple files at once?

Answer 3

Using the cp command, you can list several source files and use a directory name to specify where you want copies of those files to go. The original file names of the source files will be used as the names of the new files in the target directory.

Question 4

What will happen if you try to copy a directory to another directory using cp?

Answer 4

If you didn’t use -r (the recursive flag), you will get an error message.

Question 5

What flag can you use to overwrite a file that is not under your current username?

Answer 5

The -f (force) flag.

Question 6

What flag can you use in order to prompt for confirmation when copying over existing files?

Answer 6

cp -i

Question 7

What command is used to delete files and folders?

Answer 7

rm

Question 8

The process for moving files is almost identical to that of copying files. Which command is really just a combination of cp and rm to achieve the desired outcome of moving a file from one location to another?

Answer 8

mv

Question 9

Can you use the mv command to move a file across systems?

Answer 9

No.

Question 10

What is the Unix philosophy for commands?

Answer 10

Don one thing, and do it well.

Question 11

With these seemingly small individual commands, we can build some impressive work flows by redirecting the output of one command to the input to another command using the ____ operator.

Answer 11

pipe ( | )

Question 12

In addition to redirecting the output from one process and sending it to another process, we can alos write that output to a file using the ____ operator.

Answer 12

>

Question 13

We can use the > to write data to a file, but how can we read data from a file?

Answer 13

With the

Question 14

What are two common command line search tools?

Answer 14

ack and ag

Question 15

How do you run an ag search?

Answer 15

ag

Question 16

By default, your ag query is run recursively against _____.

Answer 16

the current directory

Question 17

If you want to specify a path to search against with ag, what can you do?

Answer 17

Pass as a final argument the path you want to search.

Question 18

Both Ack and Ag treat the search term as a _____ by default.

Answer 18

regular expression

Question 19

How can you stop Ag and Ack from treating your search term as a regular expression, and instead find the exact pattern you type?

Answer 19

using the -Q flag

Question 20

What flag can you use if you just want to see the filenames where the pattern was found, rather than the line number, etc.?

Answer 20

the list flag (-l)

Question 21

By default, all Ag and Ack searches are case-sensitive, but you can change this with the __ flag.

Answer 21

-i

Question 22

What flag can you use to limit the scope of your Ack or Ag search?

Answer 22

the -G flag (-g for Ack, -G for Ag)

e.g.: ag readme -l -G action
searches for readme in files which have “action” in the filename

Question 23

How do you use the -ignore-dir flag?

Answer 23

ag readme -l –ignore-dir=railties/lib

command, search term, flag, flag = name of directory to be ignored

Question 24

Can you string multiple -ignore-dir flags together?

Answer 24

Yes

Question 25

Can you use -ignore-dir to ignore particular files?

Answer 25

Yes

Question 26

Which file specifies ignore files for Ag and Ack, respectively?

Answer 26

.agignore and .ackrc

Question 27

Since Ag and Ack expect standard input as a source for searching, we can use other commands to _____.

Answer 27

provide data to search over.

Question 28

How would you search through all of the running processes to find one that contains the term forego?

Answer 28

ps -e | ag forego

Question 29

How can you get a print out of Ag or Ack’s full features?

Answer 29

Call the command with no parameters.