Shell command options you didn't know you needed (or possibly even existed) #4

OK - this is the first one that surprised me in this series - #1 and #2 were things I kind of knew had to exist, it was just a matter of finding them, but this one was more "Oh. Oh that's neat." Also, obvious in hindsight :D

We're talking about grep -Z.

Following on from #3, in fact - the -Z option spits out filenames from grep terminated by NUL. Same reasoning as find -print0, but allows you to do things like this:

grep -l -r -Z "error" . | xargs -0 cp -t failurelogs/

And yes, cp -t does exactly what you expect :D

Shell command options you didn't know you needed #1

Mike Whitaker ・ Mar 4 '20 ・ 1 min read

#shell #linux #unix