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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

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Send e-mail if host is 'dead' or not reachable
Cleaner with a mailto assignment in crontab (if the command fails you get an email): MAILTO=admin@example.com 10,30,50 * * * * ping -q -c1 -w3 192.168.0.14 >/dev/null

Print a row of characters across the terminal
Print a row of characters across the terminal. Uses tput to establish the current terminal width, and generates a line of characters just long enough to cross it. In the example '#' is used. It's possible to use a repeating sequence by dividing the columns by the number of characters in the sequence like this: $ seq -s'~-' 0 $(( $(tput cols) /2 )) | tr -d '[:digit:]' or $ seq -s'-~?' 0 $(( $(tput cols) /3 )) | tr -d '[:digit:]' You will lose chararacters at the end if the length isn't cleanly divisible.

See the top 10 IP addresses in a web access log

To have only unique lines in a file

processes per user counter
enumerates the number of processes for each user. ps BSD format is used here , for standard Unix format use : ps -eLf |awk '{$1} {++P[$1]} END {for(a in P) if (a !="UID") print a,P[a]}'

A function to find the newest file in a directory
Works recusivley in the specified dir or '.' if none given. Repeatedly calls 'find' to find a newer file, when no newer files exist you have the newest. In this case 'newest' means most recently modified. To find the most recently created change -newer to -cnewer.

To get how many users logged in and logged out and how many times ?

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Capture video of a linux desktop
This will grab the image from desktop, starting with the upper-left corner at x=100, y=200 with a width and height of 1024?768.

Remove all HTML tags from a file
A shorter version of command #3014, using awk instead of sed. Useful when scraping websites with a script.


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