Commands by unixmonkey19863 (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

Change the extension of a filename by using rename to convert
This will change all files ending in .JPG to .jpg and will work with any file extension

Customer Friendly free
makes more sense to customers XD

Convert decimal numbers to binary
Convert some decimal numbers to binary numbers. You could also build a general base-converter: $ function convBase { echo "ibase=$1; obase=$2; $3" | bc; } then you could write $ function decToBun { convBase 10 2 $1; }

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well.

Find the package that installed a command

Keep one instance of an irc chat client in a screen session
This command attempts to attach to existing irssi session, if one exists, otherwise creates one. I use "irc" because I use different irc clients depending on what system I am working on. Consistency is queen.

Alert visually until any key is pressed
I learned a few things reading this command. But I did run into a few issues: 1. On systems that don't use GNU echo (e.g. macOS 10.14.5 Mojave), the e option may not be supported. In this case ANSI escape codes will echoed as text and the terminal will not flash, like this: \e[?5h\e[38;5;1m A L E R T Thu Jun 20 16:31:29 PDT 2019 2. Since the read command strips\ignores leading backslashes, if a user types the backslash character once in the loop, it will not break. Typing backslash twice in a loop will break as expected. 3. The foreground color is set to red (\e[38;5;1m) on every loop. This could be set once before we call while, and then reset once when the loop breaks. 4. Instead of resetting the foreground color when it breaks, the video mode is set back to normal (\e[?5l). This has the effect of leaving the terminal text red until it is manually reset. The alternative I'm proposing here addresses these issues. I tested it on macOS and Arch Linux.

"Pretty print" $PATH, separate path per line
from: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-and-scripting/28047-split-print-path.html

Generate a Random MAC address
Use the following variation for FreeBSD: $ openssl rand 6 | xxd -p | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/:$//'

Find unused IPs on a given subnet
Somewhat shorter version.


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: