commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.
Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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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Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
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The backslash avoids any 'rm' alias that might be present and runs the 'rm' command in $PATH instead.
In a misguided attempt to be more "friendly", some Linux distributions (or sites/etc.) alias 'rm' to 'rm -i'. Unfortunately, this trains users to expect that files won't actually be deleted until they okay it. This expectation will fail with catastrophic results when they use other distributions, move to other sites, etc., and doesn't really even work 100% even with the alias. It's too late to fix 'rm', but '\rm' should work everywhere (under bash).
creates a new tab for each of N servers in listofservers.txt and ssh's to said servers
then, try the "send to all sessions" feature of konsole to do the same work on all servers at the same time. BIG time saver, but be careful!
The last ; is important. example:
time { rm -rf /folder/bar && mkdir -p /folder/bar ; echo "done" ; }
command is a bash builtin
converts encoding of a file to unix utf-8
useful for data files that contain what would be usable ascii text but are encoded as mpeg or some other encoding that prevents you from doing common manipulations like 'sed'
Ever logged into a *nix box and needed to know which webserver is running and where all the current access_log files are? Run this one liner to find out. Works for Apache or Lighttpd as long as CustomLog name is somewhat standard. HINT: works great as input into for loop, like this:
for i in `lsof -p $(netstat -ltpn|awk '$4 ~ /:80$/ {print substr($7,1,index($7,"/")-1)}')| awk '$9 ~ /access.log$/ {print $9| "sort -u"}'` ; do echo $i; done
Very useful for triage on unfamiliar servers!
puts command in background and sends its output to nohup.out file
it will not die if you log out fromyour shell session ;-)
Using +F will put less in follow mode. This works similar to 'tail -f'. To stop scrolling, use the interrupt. Then you'll get the normal benefits of less (scroll, etc.).
Pressing SHIFT-F will resume the 'tailling'.
above line in .bash_profile will give you window title in putty or terminal client when you login to your remote server
Ever need to know why Apache is bogging down *right now*? Hate scanning Apache's Extended server-status for the longest running requests? Me, too. That's why I use this one liner to quickly find suspect web scripts that might need review.
Assuming the Extended server-status is reachable at the target URL desired, this one-liner parses the output through elinks (rendering the HTML) and shows a list of active requests sorted by longest running request at the bottom of the list. I include the following fields (as noted in the header line):
Seconds: How long the request is alive
PID: Process ID of the request handler
State: State of the request, limited to what I think are the relevant ones (GCRK_.)
IP: Remote Host IP making the request
Domain: Virtual Host target (HTTP/1.1 Host: header). Important for Virtual Hosting servers
TYPE: HTTP verb
URL: requested URL being served.
Putting this in a script that runs when triggered by high load average can be quite revealing. Can also capture "forgotten" scripts being exploited such as "formmail.pl", etc.
It would be nice if commandlinefu.com had a better domain name. Will they pick one of the above; We'll see.
FreeBSD version of the Linux command
mount discimg.iso /cdrom -o loop
The "mdconfig" command creates a device and prints the name (typically "md0"). Just append that to "/dev/" and mount.
Once unmounted, you can unconfigure the device with
mdconfig -d -u 0
using "0" for md0, "1" for md1, etc.
tail would be considered dull, but pair this with being able to push out unix commands over ARD, and life gets easier. (Same can be said for my TimeMachine scrape command, http://xrl.us/begrzb)
Many sites with Flash video players will download video files to /tmp on Linux, with temporary filenames like "FlashbGTHm4". These will often play in mplayer, totem, or other movie playing software. You must first navigate to a video page, let it start loading, and then pause playback.
While they are few config options and even fewer useful details regarding what actually is being sent by the time machine 'backupd' process, this can at least tell you its doing something, how much it's doing, and exactly how often. Via macosxhints, http://xrl.us/begrwa, which in turn was via comments