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01/13/2005: Obscure Unix utility: look
After almost eight years of administering various flavors of Unix (Digital Unix, FreeBSD, Linux, Irix, Solaris, AIX, and even shudder SCO), it's surprising to discover a useful Unix command-line utility that you've completely overlooked.
This week I discovered look. look doesn't do much. All it does is grep through the system dictionary, /usr/share/dict/words, for words beginning with the given string. That is,
$ look imm
produces the same output as
$ grep ^imm /usr/share/dict/words
which is what I had been typing to find out how to spell "imminent."
Using look doesn't do anything different, but it does save me a bunch of keystrokes.
Brock on 01.13.05 @ 09:56 PM CST
