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Redirecting Input and Output

Append Redirect shell command

The >> shell command is used to redirect the standard output of the command on the left and append (add) it to the end of the file on the right.

# This command will append "Hello World!" to greetings.txt
echo "Hello World!" >> greetings.txt

Pipe shell command

The | command is called a pipe. It is used to pipe, or transfer, the standard output from the command on its left into the standard input of the command on its right.

# First, echo "Hello World" will send Hello World to the standard output.
# Next, pipe | will transfer the standard output to the next command's standard input.
# Finally, wc -w will count the number of words from its standard input, which is 2.
echo "Hello World" | wc -w

Redirecting Output

The > symbol is used to redirect output by taking the output from the command on the left and passing as input to the file on the right.

echo "Hello" > hello.txt

cat Display

The shell command cat displays the contents of one or more files to the terminal.

$ cat poem.txt
$ cat poem.txt kitties.txt

grep Search

The shell command grep is used to search files for lines that match a pattern and returns the results. Various options can be specified along with the grep command to specify the search.

In the provided example, the lines in the file names.txt which contain “sonny” will be returned.

grep 'sonny' names.txt

Case insensitive search

The shell grep command searches files for a particular pattern. The grep command with the -i option can be used to search files for lines that match a pattern, case insensitive, and returns the results.

grep -R shell command

The shell command grep has a -R option (grep -R) that searches all files in a directory, including its subdirectories, and outputs filenames and lines containing matched results.

Command Line Redirection

On a command line, redirection is the process of using the input/output of a file or command to use it as an input for another file. It is similar but different from pipes, as it allows reading/writing from files instead of only commands.

Redirection can be done by using the operators > and >>.

ls > directories_list.txt
ls >> directories_list.txt

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