Commands by stew_rt (1)

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

Easily search running processes (alias).

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Command line progress bar
This command tar?s up a directory and sends the output to gzip, showing a rate of 223MB/s. This may require you installing the pv command. For debian based users out there: $ sudo aptitude install pv

Get a diff of two json arrays
jq is amazing for manipulating json on the commandline, but the developers have some weird ideas about how to handle shell redirections. This command works around them. Further reading: https://github.com/stedolan/jq/issues/1110

list files recursively by size

Sort specific lines while editing within vi
Sort lines within vi editor. In this example sort lines 33-61 and lines 4-9 asciibetically.

Pass TAB as field separator to sort, join, cut, etc.
Use this BASH trick to create a variable containing the TAB character and pass it as the argument to sort, join, cut and other commands which don't understand the \t notation. $ sort -t $'\t' ... $ join -t $'\t' ... $ cut -d $'\t' ...

See system users

Switch all connected PulseAudio bluetooth devices to A2DP profile
Tries to switch all audio devices to the A2DP profile for optimal sound quality. Useful for bluetooth speakers and headphones that always power up in HSP/HFP mode. Note however that this command is only a shorthand for the GUI, so it cannot fix stubborn BT controllers that leave your device stuck in HSP mode until a manual re-coupling.

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.


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: