All commands

All commands (14,187)

sorted by

sun solaris 9 complete restart

init states on solaris are numbered init 0 boot with prompt init 5 shutdown init 6 reboot
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-11

init 6

miccaman · 2009-05-29 07:44:05 4
Randomize lines in a file

This appends a random number as a first filed of all lines in SOMEFILE then sorts by the first column and finally cuts of the random numbers.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
4

awk 'BEGIN{srand()}{print rand(),$0}' SOMEFILE | sort -n | cut -d ' ' -f2-

axelabs · 2009-05-29 01:20:50 11
Awk: Perform a rolling average on a column of data

Sometimes jittery data hides trends, performing a rolling average can give a clearer view.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
3

awk 'BEGIN{size=5} {mod=NR%size; if(NR<=size){count++}else{sum-=array[mod]};sum+=$1;array[mod]=$1;print sum/count}' file.dat

mungewell · 2009-05-29 00:07:24 4
'Fix' a typescript file created by the 'script' program to remove control characters

attribution: Thanks to repellent on perlmonks.org source: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=684459
This is sample output - yours may be different.
13

cat typescript | perl -pe 's/\e([^\[\]]|\[.*?[a-zA-Z]|\].*?\a)//g' | col -b > typescript-processed

unixmonkey3987 · 2009-05-28 21:02:17 20
Zip a directory on Mac OS X and ignore .DS_Store (metadata) directory

If you want to generate a cross-platform compatible zip file and ignore the Finder's hidden metadata directory
This is sample output - yours may be different.
4

zip -vr example.zip example/ -x "*.DS_Store"

JadedEvan · 2009-05-28 20:28:12 6
greps the man pages to find utilities
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-4

apropos keyword

tobiasboon · 2009-05-28 18:44:45 6
Filter IPs out of files
This is sample output - yours may be different.
4

egrep -o '[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}' file.txt

P17 · 2009-05-28 14:46:17 8
List and delete files older than one year
This is sample output - yours may be different.
12

find <directory path> -mtime +365 -and -not -type d -delete

Gomex · 2009-05-28 14:14:49 10
grep across a git repo and open matching files in gedit
This is sample output - yours may be different.
3

git grep -l "your grep string" | xargs gedit

sfusion · 2009-05-28 10:12:19 5
find and replace tabs for spaces within files recursively
This is sample output - yours may be different.
10

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i 's/\t/ /g' {} \;

sfusion · 2009-05-28 10:10:21 7
Replace all tabs with spaces in an application

Note that this assumes the application is an SVN checkout and so we have to throw away all the .svn files before making the substitution.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
3

grep -PL "\t" -r . | grep -v ".svn" | xargs sed -i 's/\t/ /g'

root · 2009-05-28 08:52:14 5
Convert string to uppercase
This is sample output - yours may be different.
2

echo string | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'

sharfah · 2009-05-28 08:15:58 7
List of directories sorted by number of files they contain.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
3

sort -n <( for i in $(find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d); do echo $(find $i | wc -l) ": $i"; done;)

oremj · 2009-05-28 07:17:09 6

create an emergency swapfile when the existing swap space is getting tight

Create a temporary file that acts as swap space. In this example it's a 1GB file at the root of the file system. This additional capacity is added to the existing swap space. Show Sample Output

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=1024000;sudo mkswap /swapfile; sudo swapon /swapfile

dcabanis · 2009-05-27 21:10:50 12

Random numbers with Ruby

There's been a few times I've needed to create random numbers. Although I've done so in PERL, I've found Ruby is actually faster. This script generates 20 random "10" digit number NOT A RANDOM NUMBER. Replace 20 (1..20) with the amount of random numbers you need generated Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
-bash2-2.05b$ uname -sr
FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p14
-bash2-2.05b$ ruby -e "puts (1..20).map {rand(10 ** 10).to_s.rjust(10,'0')}"
6366075576
2917975774
7329745840
8691581041
5890408189
1638634981
0295194105
6344513644
4301587535
4936779610
1481540380
5683771498
6753375812
4915063505
1500897963
8012594603
1481070124
3665078190
0436854511
6307883169
```
3

ruby -e "puts (1..20).map {rand(10 ** 10).to_s.rjust(10,'0')}"

sil · 2009-05-27 19:52:53 7
change ownership en masse of files owned by a specific user, including files and directories with spaces

In the example, uid 0 is root. foo:foo are the user:group you want to make owner and group. '.' is the "current directory and below." -print0 and -0 indicate that filenames and directories "are terminated by a null character instead of by whitespace."
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

find . -uid 0 -print0 | xargs -0 chown foo:foo

abcde · 2009-05-27 19:52:13 6
Compress archive(s) or directory(ies) and split the output file

a - archive m5 - compression level, 0= lowest compression...1...2...3...4...5= max compression -v5M split the output file in 5 megabytes archives, change to 700 for a CD, or 4200 for a DVD R recursive for directories, do not use it for files It's better to have the output of a compression already split than use the 'split' command after compression, would consume the double amount of disk space. Found at http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/05/howto-create-split-rar-files-in-ubuntu.html
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

rar a -m5 -v5M -R myarchive.rar /home/

piovisqui · 2009-05-27 15:53:18 9
Clear history
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

history -c

sharfah · 2009-05-27 14:35:49 4
Change timestamp on a file

-a for access time, -m for modification time, -c do not create any files, -t timestamp
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

touch -amct [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] FILE

sharfah · 2009-05-27 14:33:22 5
ramdomize echo 'hello world!'

ramdomize the execution of the command echo 'hello world!'
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-8

(($RANDOM%6)) || echo 'hello world!'

luishka · 2009-05-27 08:11:08 12
show mysql process ids

Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
2
3131
3210
5633
6032
6061
6375
6588
6772
7092
7499
7663
```
0

mysql -s -e "show processlist" |awk '{print $1}'

aravind040 · 2009-05-27 07:22:05 5
Organize a TV-Series season

It happened to me that I got a season of a tv-show which had all files under the same folder like /home/blah/tv_show/season1/file{1,2,3,4,5,...}.avi But I like to have them like this: /home/blah/tv_show/season1/e{1,2,3,4,5,...}/file{1,2,3,4,5,...}.avi So I can have both the srt and the avi on one folder without cluttering much. This command organizes everything assuming that the filename contains Exx where xx is the number of the episode. You may need to set: IFS=$'\n' if your filenames have spaces.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

season=1; for file in $(ls) ; do dir=$(echo $file | sed 's/.*S0$season$E[0-9]\{2\}$.*/\1/'); mkdir $dir ; mv $file $dir; done

lonecat · 2009-05-27 03:30:58 4
Find if the command has an alias

Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
dusn is aliased to `du -ksc * .[A-Za-z]* | sort -n'
```
16

type -all command

marssi · 2009-05-27 02:57:32 10
fetch all revisions of a specific file in an SVN repository

exported files will get a .r23 extension (where 23 is the revision number)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
2

svn log fileName|cut -d" " -f 1|grep -e "^r[0-9]\{1,\}$"|awk {'sub(/^r/,"",$1);print "svn cat fileName@"$1" > /tmp/fileName.r"$1'}|sh

fizz · 2009-05-27 02:11:58 8

Show the last 20 sessions logged on the machine

change 20 by the number of sessions you want to know (20 it's fair enough) Show Sample Output

last -n 20

jipipayo · 2009-05-26 22:09:09 5

‹ First < 489 490 491 492 493 > Last ›

What's this?

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.

Share Your Commands

Check These Out

Show a config file without comments

Shows a file without comments (at least those starting by #) - removes empty lines - removes lines starting by # or "some spaces/tabs then #'" Useful when you want to quickly see what you have to customize on a freshly installed application without reading the comments that sometimes are a full 1000 lines documentation :) While posting, I saw this http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1041/display-contents-of-a-file-wo-any-comments-or-blank-lines But it's dirty and incomplete, to my mind My original goal was to remove lines like "\t*#" but I can't figure out how to do a egrep '\t' on a command-line. Two workarounds if needed: $egrep -v 'press control + V then TAB then #' /your/file or $egrep -v -f some_file /your/file #where some_file contains what you want to exclude, example a really inserted TAB

subtraction between lines

It's allways strange for me to see sed and awk in the same command line if you can avoid it

Get last sleep time on a Mac

Similarly for last wake time: $ sysctl -a | grep waketime

Quickly analyze apache logs for top 25 most common IP addresses.

This command is much quicker than the alternative of "sort | uniq -c | sort -n".

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"

Schedule a command while one is already running.

Useful when you have only one terminal session e.g. ssh. and want to queue up another command after the currently running has finished(in case if you forget to run that command). Originally used as ; python-updater when running emerge. When I have noticed that a package failed due to that command not run.

get you public ip address

Relies on ifconfig.me functioning. It's about as easy as it gets, and memorable to old geeks too.

Find usb device in realtime

Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Update twitter with Perl

Requires Net::Twitter. Just replace the double quoted strings with the appropriate info.

trace the system calls made by a process (and its children)

strace can be invaluable in trying to figure out what the heck some misbehaving program is doing. There are number of useful flags to limit and control its output, and to attach to already running programs. (See also 'ltrace'.)

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

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
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)

All commands (14,187) the last day the last week the last month all time sorted by date votes

What's this?

Check These Out

Stay in the loop…

All commands (14,187)

sorted by