Commands by DoNotRememberMe (8)

  • Watch any command (pipes ok, quotes be careful) and keep history in a file. Good for watching and recording any kind of status or error condition, file creations, etc. The choice of "who" as CMD was just to show an obvious usage. Uses plenty of shell tricks that can be disassembled for simpler stuff. It's deliberately not perfect, but it is generic, and can be customized for your own uses. Had to shorten a little to meet 255 chars. Better than "watch" how? It keeps a date log of what is going on, and tee'd output is plain-text. Show Sample Output


    0
    CMD="who";SEC=1;N=0;OLD="";NEW=""; while `sleep $SEC`; do OLD="$NEW"; NEW="$(eval $CMD)"; DIFF=`diff <( echo "$OLD" ) <( echo "$NEW" )`; if [ -n "$DIFF" ]; then date; echo "Diff #$N (${SEC}s): $CMD"; echo "$DIFF"; fi; N=$[$N+1]; done | tee /tmp/keepr
    DoNotRememberMe · 2010-11-15 19:55:39 3
  • Get there by going backwards and forgetting the numbers.


    5
    seq -s" " -50 -1 | tr -dc -
    DoNotRememberMe · 2010-03-25 06:00:24 32
  • If you want to relocate a package on your own, or you just want to know what those PREIN/UN and POSTIN/UN scripts will do, this will dump out all that detail simply. You may want to expand the egrep out other verbose flags like CHANGELOGTEXT etc, as your needs require. It isn't clear, but the formatting around $tag is important: %{$tag} just prints out the first line, while [%{$tag }] iterates thru multi-line output, joining the lines with a space (yes, there's a space between the g and } characters. To break it out for all newlines, use [%{$tag\n}] but the output will be long. This is aside from rpm2cpio | cpio -ivd to extract the package files.


    0
    rpm --querytags | egrep -v HEADERIMMUTABLE | sort | while read tag ; do rpm -q --queryformat "$tag: [%{$tag} ]\n" -p $SomeRPMfile ; done
    DoNotRememberMe · 2010-03-25 05:40:48 3
  • The example is a little bit bogus, but applies to any command that takes a while interactively, or might be a bit of a drag on system resources. Once the command's output is saved to a variable, you can then echo "$OUTPUT" to see it in multi-line glory after that. The use of double-quotes around the backticks and during the variable expansion disables any IFS conversion during those two operations. Very useful for reporting that might pull different lines out, like from dmidecode, inq or any other disk detail command. The only caveat is that storing too much in a variable might make your shell process grow.


    0
    OUTPUT="`find / -type f`" ; echo "$OUTPUT" | grep sysrq ; echo "$OUTPUT" | grep sysctl ; echo "$OUTPUT" | less
    DoNotRememberMe · 2010-03-25 05:02:10 5
  • Something to stuff in an alias when you are working in multiple environments. The double-pipe OR will fall through until one of the commands succeeds, and the rest won't be executed. Any STDERR will fall out, but the STDOUT from the correct command will bubble out of the parenthesis to the less command, or some other command you specify.


    5
    ( zcat $FILE || gzcat $FILE || bzcat2 $FILE ) | less
    DoNotRememberMe · 2010-03-17 03:14:48 6
  • Searches your $PATH for whatever you substitute for bash, though not sure if this will work if you substitute a different shell for bash! Show Sample Output


    6
    find ${PATH//:/ } -name \*bash\*
    DoNotRememberMe · 2010-03-16 04:26:27 8
  • When your wtmp files are being logrotated, here's an easy way to unpack them all on the fly to see more than a week in the past. The rm is the primitive way to prevent symlink prediction attack.


    5
    ( last ; ls -t /var/log/wtmp-2* | while read line ; do ( rm /tmp/wtmp-junk ; zcat $line 2>/dev/null || bzcat $line ) > /tmp/junk-wtmp ; last -f /tmp/junk-wtmp ; done ) | less
    DoNotRememberMe · 2010-03-16 04:17:16 3
  • No need to type out the full OR clause if you know which OS you're on, but this is easy cut-n-paste or alias to get top ten directories by singleton. To avoid the error output from du -xSk you could always 2>/dev/null but you might miss relevant STDERR.


    4
    ( du -xSk || du -kod ) | sort -nr | head
    DoNotRememberMe · 2010-03-16 04:05:14 4

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

securely erase unused blocks in a partition
This command securely erases all the unused blocks on a partition. The unused blocks are the "free space" on the partition. Some of these blocks will contain data from previously deleted files. You might want to use this if you are given access to an old computer and you do not know its provenance. The command could be used while booted from a LiveCD to clear freespace space on old HD. On modern Linux LiveCDs, the "ntfs-3g" system provides ReadWrite access to NTFS partitions thus enabling this method to also be used on Wind'ohs drives. NB depending on the size of the partition, this command could take a while to complete.

Use the builtin ':' bash command to increment variables
I just found another use for the builtin ':' bash command. It increments counters for me in a loop if a certain condition is met... : [arguments] No effect; the command does nothing beyond expanding arguments and performing any specified redirections. A zero exit code is returned.

Gets the last string of previous command with !$
It helps you save a lot of writing :-)

run php code inline from the command line
Most people know that you can run a PHP script from the command line like so: $php ./my_script.php But sometimes I just want to run a quick bit of code, the PHP Command Line Interface allows me to do so with the -r option. Requires package php5-cli

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"

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

List your installed Chromium extensions (with url to each page)
Gives you a list for all installed chrome (chromium) extensions with URL to the page of the extension. With this you can easy add a new Bookmark folder called "extensions" add every URL to that folder, so it will be synced and you can access the names from every computer you are logged in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Only tested with chromium, for chrome you maybe have to change the find $PATH.

Commandline document conversion with Libreoffice
In this example, the docx gets converted to Open Document .odt format. For other formats, you'll need to specify the correct filter (Hint: see "Comments" link below for a nice list).

Delete recursively only empty folders on present dir

find which lines in a file are longer than N characters
Filter out lines of input that contain 72, or fewer, characters. This uses bash only. ${#i} is the number of characters in variable i.


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: