I ran into this into the following article, “Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits“. This article is mainly common sense, but there are interesting points, such as :
- avoid piping when you can, in order to save performance (the classical construct grep | wc to count the lines is useless as most versions of grep can count with grep -c)
- use awk to “grep” on a specific field of a line with “… | awk ‘$1 == “XXX”‘ which is cool and I never use
- the find | xargs construct (I’d add “find -print0 | xargs -0”, useful if your find brings back filenames with a space inside …)
All in all it is worth a reading, if only to refresh your memory.