Putting it all on one line

9th March 2008

One of the nice things about the Linux/UNIX command line is that you get the options of stringing together a number of commands on one line for submission of all for processing at one go. Separating them with && does the trick but I noticed that semicolon delimitation worked as well. Here’s a line that will install VMware for you in one fell swoop:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential gcc-3.4 && tar xzf VMware-workstation-6.0.2-59824.i386.tar.gz && export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4 && cd vmware-distrib && sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Another trick is to direct the output of one command into another like the following which subsets a process listing:

ps -aux | grep "wine"

It’s all good stuff and is the sort of thing that shows why so many Linux/UNIX types love their command line so much.

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Putting it all on one line

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