I like a tool called tl;dr
.
It gives you basic knowledge of many commands.
On macOS it’s a good’ol brew install tldr
They also have a nodejs client, so it can be installed with npm.
EG:
❯ tldr grep
grep
Find patterns in files using regular expressions.
More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.html>.
- Search for a pattern within a file:
grep "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Search for an exact string (disables regular expressions):
grep --fixed-strings "exact_string" path/to/file
- Search for a pattern in all files recursively in a directory, showing line numbers of matches, ignoring binary files:
grep --recursive --line-number --binary-files=without-match "search_pattern" path/to/directory
- Use extended regular expressions (supports `?`, `+`, `{}`, `()` and `|`), in case-insensitive mode:
grep --extended-regexp --ignore-case "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Print 3 lines of context around, before, or after each match:
grep --context|before-context|after-context=3 "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Print file name and line number for each match:
grep --with-filename --line-number "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Search for lines matching a pattern, printing only the matched text:
grep --only-matching "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Search stdin for lines that do not match a pattern:
cat path/to/file | grep --invert-match "search_pattern"
If a command does not exist, you can add it with a PR on their repo.
It’s a community-based FOSS tool.
Saves me a ton of time in googling and reading man pages.