Saturday in the School of Bash: find, grep, pipes, and xargs

2026-03-18

On Saturday I spent some time continuing to learn Bash. The focus for this session was mainly on find, grep, pipes, and xargs.

Learning with ChatGPT is so easy. It’s like having a 25 year veteran sitting next to your and personally teaching you. Huge difference. Even with a quality class or instructional video, you don’t get personalized instruction with immediate feedback.

By the time I got done I was able to explain everything going on here:

find public_html -type f -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -ni "eval(base64_decode"

Which is pretty amazing. I went from understanding nothing to having this understanding in a short period of time. That isn’t “hey look at me” - I am bragging about ChatGPT. It could teach anything to anyone ha.

Learning bash and understanding Linux at a deeper level is fun though. Stuff like finding out find is recursive by default or what is going on with pipes or getting something to show line numbers in the output… It’s all really neat.

Anyone saying they wouldn’t have used ChatGPT for this back in the day is lying. I have zero shame about not learning this “the old fashioned way” or using ChatGPT for diagnosing problems, helping read outputs, etc..

Even if I use ChatGPT to assemble commands, you kinda need to know what can be asked for, situations where this can solve a problem, and generally have some familiarity to work back and forth. I also have enough familiarity to understand when it’s sending me down a rabbit trail or not wandering from stated restrictions.

Overall the goal of this session was not to learn new commands but to reinforce the basics from my first long session and understand how these tools fit together.