less - A random tip

To view files on the command line, you’ll likely want to use less. Yesterday I had no internet on the train and didn’t have anything to do; so I read through the manual of less (what a normal thing to do, right?). I found out a lot of interesting things less can do, but the most useful thing I didn’t know about was the following: You can filter the lines of the output by pressing & and then entering a regular expression matching the lines you would like to see. This looks super handy if you’re for example looking at a log file and want to see all lines containing “error” - just enter &error. In comparison to searching with /, it gives you more information at a glance. Quite wonderful.

Extra Tip: You can use zless to directly view compressed output without having to uncompress it first.