Explain how and what the following commands are trying to accomplish. Looking fo

Question

Explain how and what the following commands are trying to accomplish. Looking for an expert to double check my work and maybe give some pointers as I am new to UNIX.
ls /etc | grep conf | grep -v "." | sort > ~/conf

In this pipe we have the first command ls /etc which lists the contents of the directory /etc which is then piped using the | operator and a filter to the standard in of the grep conf command which searches the contents of the directory /etc for any lines of the input stream for text containing conf. The data is then piped from the standard out and into the standard in of the grep -v "." Command where it searches through all the lines in the files that contain conf for lines without a period, then pipes it using a filter to the sort > ~/conf command. The sort then sorts the results into alphabetical order, then the > operator creates the file in the home directory ~/conf.

cat /etc/passwd | awk -F":" '{print $1}' | sort >> ~/users 2>&1

In this pipe, the first command cat /etc/passwd displays all of the content in the file /etc/passwd then this information is piped using a filter to the  awk -F":" '{print $1}' command. The awk -F":" '{print $1}' command then uses the awk –F”:” to put a space in then : (field separator) and  then the actual awk command  '{print $1}' which prints the first field of each line then pipes it to the sort >> ~/users 2>&1 command using a filter. The data is then sorted into alphabetical order and next redirected using the >> (append) operator to the end of the home directory file ~ /users. The 2>&1 portion of the command takes the standard error data and sends it to the same place as the standard out.

Thanks

Explanation / Answer

Looks correct to me. I would mention though, that if you wrote those commands it's probably better to use "ls -1" in place of "ls" since it will only print out the file name and not permissions, owner, modification time, etc.

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