the command for the impatient sysadmin: simply checks every five secs, if a host or a specific service running on it is up. ideal for hosts that are configured not to respond on pings.

This will email [email protected] a message with the body: "rsync done" when there are no processes of rsync running. This can be changed for other uses by changing $(pgrep rsync) to something else, and echo "rsync done" | mailx [email protected] to another command.

Very helpful when you've got complex filenames and needs to change just some small parts of it.

Renaming a file called "i-made-a-small-typo-right-here" to "i-made-a-big-typo-right-here":

You could also copy multiple files, edit, remove, process, etc.

This will start a netcat process listening on port 666. If you are able connect to your your server, netcat will receive the data being sent and spit it out to the screen (it may look like random garbage, so you might want to redirect it to a file).

no external commands, but can only do 0-99, not 1-100, so we adjust it later

alternative using 'host'

preferred way to query ps for a specific process name (not supported with all flavors of ps, but will work on just about any linux afaik)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_Unique_Identifier

http://www.ossp.org/pkg/lib/uuid/

You'll first need to install the uuid package. Available immediately from apt in Ubuntu, Debian, or other myriad Debian variants. You could always compile it from source as well.

Best to put it in a file somewhere in your path. (I call the file spath)

#!/bin/bash

IFS=:; find $PATH | grep $1

Usage: $ spath php

watch is a command especially designed for doing this job

This command produces the output of "du -sk testfile" in every 10 seconds. You can change the command to be whatever you want.

I dont have curl or links installed, so I use wget with write file as standard out.

command is shorter, output unnecessary longer

This regular expression removes all HTML-Tags from the file.

You can use that to create a excludefile for nmap, to find hosts, with no DHCP lease in your DHCP range.

Turns regular quotes into curly quotes, also converts hyphens to dashes using a heuristic and outputs the result as UTF-8, suitable to copy/paste into wordprocessor.

requires: http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/ (which does most of the work)

(I renamed smartypants.pl to smartypants before adding it to my $PATH)

Also requrires PHP with the multibyte module installed (its installed by default with PHP, but the sysadmin on one server I use disabled it... presumadly to increase performance or something).

Lists ONLY the files changed by the given HASH/HEAD/list of hashes, etc. The message, commit ID, author, etc. is not included

Best to try first with -n flag, to preview

This lengthy cryptic line will print the latest top 10 commandlinefu.com posts without their summaries. To print also their respective summaries use the following (even bigger) command line:

It is recommended to include this line into a shell script to be easily run, as I do myself. You could also use the following URLs to browse the top 3 commands:

.. or all others:

PS: You need to install "xmlstarlet" to run it. It is found in Debian APT repositories (apt-get install xmlstarlet) or under the http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/ URL.

translate and number lines is simpler and you use tr to choose your delimiter (eg for csv files)

The original doesn't work for me - but this does. I'm guessing that Youtube updated the video page so the original doesn't work.

A lot of X applications accept --geometry parameter so that you can set application size and position. But how can you figure out the exact arguments for --geometry? Launch an application, resize and reposition its window as needed, then launch xwininfo in a terminal an click on the application window. You will see some useful window info including its geometry.

When you have one of those (log)files that only has epoch for time (since no one will ever look at them as a date) this is a way to get the human readable date/time and do further inspection.

Mostly perl-fu :-/

This command will find the biggest files recursively under a certain directory, no matter if they are too many. If you try the regular commands ("find -type f -exec ls -laSr {} +" or "find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -laSr") the sorting won't be correct because of command line arguments limit.

This command won't use command line arguments to sort the files and will display the sorted list correctly.