Advanced file operations

When you’re working with files in Unix-like operating systems, you’ll often want to perform actions on them, with them, or with their content, but without directly modifying them in an editor. For example, you may want to:

• Search a file to see if it contains some content you’re looking for.
• Identify a batch of files that was modified at a specific time.
• Securely move a file to another system, instead of just copying it around with mv on the local machine.

You may even want to combine all three into a single action! This type of knowledge can really come in handy during troubleshooting (searching for a specific request ID or error code in a log), during development (finding recently modified source code files), or when you want to do some testing (copying updated application source code to a test system).

Here’s a quick look at these kinds of file operations, to give you an idea of the tools and...