Truthfully, the utilities you've learned in the
past few days will be enough to get you through 99% of your workday.
As a web technician, you will rarely need to do anything beyond file
creation and manipulation. UNIX-based process, hardware, and security
management will be tasks handled by the system administrator,
not you.
However, there are several utilities that merit
mention here because if you become comfortable with them, the remaining 1%
of your time will be made much happier.
The first set of tools you should become familiar
with are the searching tools, namely, "grep" and "find". These two utilities allow
you to search a file for keywords and the file system for file names
respectively.
You can imagine how crucial these tools will be when you
begin to manage sites with hundreds or thousands of web pages.
More than likely
you will forget where certain bits of information are kept. Without "grep"
and "find", finding these files could be like finding a needle in a haystack.
We'll discuss both these utilities in just a bit, but first
we need to say a word about "regular expressions" because regular expressions
(REGEX) are the foundations of searching.
We have already introduced
regular expressions when we talked about wild cards. If you recall,
when using utilities, UNIX allows you to use a special character to
represent some "pattern". For example, you'll recall,
"??" could substitute for any two characters in a file name.
Well, as it turns out, regular expressions appear again
in searching. They are, however, slightly different, so
let's take a look at how some of the most common
ones work.
