Command (Program) Otions

Everybody is requested to think about what options they use so much their fingers type 
them in automatically. What are your favorite options for common programs that have a 
million of them (such as *ls*). Have you discovered an option that surprised you when 
you found out how useful it might be? Have you found a way of doing something that 
didn't seem possible befiore?

Please Contribute

ls

• -lart .. long, all (including dotfiles), reverse-sort on modification-time. The last changes show at the bottom of the output, and so they are always visible just above the next command prompt.
• -lArt .. A slight improvement on -lart. It does not show .., the parent directory or ., the current directory.

grep

• -slr .. silently ignore directories you have no permission to scan, but do a recursive scan and just list the filenames that match the pattern. actual use example:

  grep -slr "import unittest" ./work/python

• --include= .. restrict a recursive grep to look only into files of the specified pattern. example:

  grep --include="*.py" -slr "import unittest" ./work/python