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submitted 2 weeks ago by marighost@piefed.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I've been setting up a new Proxmox server and messing around with VMs, and wanted to know what kind of useful commands I'm missing out on. Bonus points for a little explainer.

Journalctl | grep -C 10 'foo' was useful for me when I needed to troubleshoot some fstab mount fuckery on boot. It pipes Journalctl (boot logs) into grep to find 'foo', and prints 10 lines before and after each instance of 'foo'.

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[-] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I'm not much of a one-liner collector but I like this one:

vim +copen -q <(grep -r -n <search> .) 

which searches for some string and opens all instances in vim's quickfix list (and opens the quickfix window too). Navigate the list with :cn and :cn. Complex-ish edits are the obvious use case, but I use this for browsing logs too.

Neovim improves on this with nvim -q - and [q/]q, and plenty of fuzzy finder plugins can do a better version using ripgrep, but this basic one works on any system that has gnu grep and vim.

Edit:

This isn't exactly a command, but I can't imagine not knowing about this anymore:

$ man grep
/  -n       # double space before the dash!

brings you directly to the documentation of the -n option. Not the useless synopsis or any other paragraphs that mention -n in passing, but the actual doc for this option (OK, very occasionally it fails due to word wrap, but assuming the option is documented then it works 99% of the time).

this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
165 points (98.2% liked)

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