Finding words, especially when you just can’t think of them

Well because it is all kick ass and I use it often as odd as that sounds I thought I would spread the word about the built in word list in *nix operating systems. I will provide an example and then leave it up to you to understand how to modify it and use it.

*nix has a built in word list at /usr/share/dict/words so as neat as that is who wants to just read words for lines and lines. So lets use some simple RegExp stuff to find something we want.

Ok so we have seen del.icio.us and sites with clever domain names and we want one really bad. Problem is we are not good at just thinking of vocabulary words all day long, who is? So lets make some magic.

egrep -ri us$ /usr/share/dict/words >> ~/words_us.txt

So what did we just do? Well we used egrep with some regular expressions, a really cheesy uninteresting one but it gets us what we need. In case you have never used them, learn them a little bit at least cause they will really help out more than you can know. Lets break it down. egrep is like grep except better, it is more in depth than that but that is all you need to know if you don’t already. The -ri switch that we are sending is letting it know that we are using a RegExp and that we don’t care about case. The next part, us$, is just telling it to only show us the words that end in us and finally we are sending the output of that command into a file in our home that is named words_us.txt. The reason for this is to let us sort out our domains. We could use a nice and awesome RegExp to get all the ones we want but I think that this way is easier and it separates our lists of potential domain names. So now we would do what? Make a file for all the ones that end in net and so on like-a-da-so.

egrep -ri net$ /usr/share/dict/words >> ~/words_net.txt

Hope this all made sense and it is a very dirty and quick run down for anyone who might find this and say “Wow I didn’t know that!”