For me, Open Source software is very much about leverage. Open Source tools allow their creators to share their own productivity enhancements with the entire community, thereby making everybody more efficient.

That’s powerful.

The Linux command-line is simply another one of these tools, but I’m finding that a lot of folks these days don’t get as much leverage from the shell as they could, and that’s really too bad. So I created my “Command-Line Kung Fu” talk as a compact way for me to download a few tricks and idioms that will make anybody vastly more effective and efficient in Linux.

Let me show you what I mean with a couple of examples:

• What does this bit of shell fu do?

for f in *; do mv -- "$f" "${f// /_}"; done

• Which of these is faster? Why? And how can you tell?

find /usr/include -type f -exec grep -l sockaddr_in {} \;
find /usr/include -type f | xargs grep -l sockaddr_in
grep -rl sockaddr_in /usr/include

Curious about the answers? Come to my talk! Have a thorny problem that you just can’t figure out the right set of commands for, or have a solution that you’re not happy with? I’ll even take requests!

Assuming you’re sufficiently geeked out by my talk, you’ll probably want to follow it up with Philip Tellis’ “Programming Patterns in sed” talk, which will be happening right after my talk. And after that you can get down with Josh Cronemeyer’s talk on “Your Shell History in the Cloud”.

Yep, it’s a whole afternoon of shell fu for you!

(Image “Squirrel Fu” courtesy Greg Westfall. Used under Creative Commons.)