Commands tagged terminal

After installing Termbeamer (see termbeamer.com) you can use it to share a terminal session with one or more others even from behind a firewall or NAT.

When your ssh session hanged (probably due to some network issues) you can "kill" it by hitting those 3 keys instead of closing the entire terminal.

Changes your group to the default group, has the same effect as sourcing your profile/rc file (in any shell) or logging out and back in again.

You may want to just use the shortcut "." instead of "source"

Any changes to BASH shell made in .bashrc will be active in the current terminal window from the moment you execute this command, ie. aliases, prompt settings etc. No need to restart terminal.

(In BASH 'source' simile to 'eval' lets you generally execute any bunch of commands stacked in a text file).

This will change your terminal foreground colour.Depending on the system, tput uses the terminfo or termcap database, as well as looking into the environment for the terminal type.

You can use "setb" to set terminal background colour

One person does `mkfifo foo; script -f foo' and another can supervise real-time what is being done using `cat foo'.

In Mac OS X, by default, you have to click the mouse on a Terminal window before you can type in it. You can change this behavior to mimic the X11 behavior of focusing on the window on mouseover.

Continue a current job in the background and detach it from current terminal

Often times you run a command in the terminal and you don't realize it's going to take forever. You can open a new terminal, but you lose the local history of the suspended one. You can stop the running command using , but that may produce undesirable side-effects. suspends the job, and (assuming you have no other jobs running in the background) %1 resumes it. Appending & tells it to run in the background.

You now have a job running concurrently with your terminal. Note this will still print any output to the same terminal you're working on.

Tested on zsh and bash.

This is super fast and an easy way to test your terminal for 256 color support. Unlike alot of info about changing colors in the terminal, this uses the ncurses termcap/terminfo database to determine the escape codes used to generate the colors for a specific TERM. That means you can switch your terminal and then run this to check the real output.

at any rate that is some super lean code!

Here it is in function form to stick in your .bash_profile

aa_256 ()

{

( x=`tput op` y=`printf %$((${COLUMNS}-6))s`;

for i in {0..256};

do

o=00$i;

echo -e ${o:${#o}-3:3} `tput setaf $i;tput setab $i`${y// /=}$x;

done )

}

From my bash_profile: http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Use GNU/screen as a terminal emulator for anything serial console related.

screen /dev/tty

eg.

screen /dev/ttyS0 9600

MacOSX: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061109133825654

Cheat Sheet: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/screen-terminal-emulator-cheat-sheet/

One of the first functions programmers learn is how to print a line. This is my 100% bash builtin function to do it, which makes it as optimal as a function can be. The COLUMNS environment variable is also set by bash (including bash resetting its value when you resize your term) so its very efficient. I like pretty-output in my shells and have experimented with several ways to output a line the width of the screen using a minimal amount of code. This is like version 9,000 lol.

This function is what I use, though when using colors or other terminal features I create separate functions that call this one, since this is the lowest level type of function. It might be better named printl(), but since I use it so much it's more optimal to have the name contain less chars (both for my programming and for the internal workings).

If you do use terminal escapes this will reset to default.

For implementation ideas, check my

http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Get colorful fortunes dictated by an ASCII cow. For full enjoyment you'll need to have color setup enabled for your terminal.

One of my favorite ways to impress newbies (and old hats) to the power of the shell, is to give them an incredibly colorful and amazing version of the top command that runs once upon login, just like running fortune on login. It's pretty sweet believe me, just add this one-liner to your ~/.bash_profile -- and of course you can set the height to be anything, from 1 line to 1000!

Doesn't take more than the below toprc file I've added below, and you get all 4 top windows showing output at the same time.. each with a different color scheme, and each showing different info. Each window would normally take up 1/4th of your screen when run like that - TOP is designed as a full screen program. But here's where you might learn something new today on this great site.. By using the stty command to change the terminals internal understanding of the size of your terminal window, you force top to also think that way as well.

# save the correct settings to G var.

# change the number of rows to half the actual amount, or 50 otherwise

# run top non-interactively for 1 second, the output stays on the screen (half at least)

# reset the terminal back to the correct values, and clean up after yourself

This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ], though the online version will be updated soon. Just think what else you could run like this!

Note 1: I had to edit the toprc file out due to this site can't handle that (uploads/including code). So you can grab it from [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html my site ]

Note 2: I had to come back and edit again because the links weren't being correctly parsed

By default, screen tries to restore its old window sizes when attaching to resizable terminals. This command is the command-line equivalent to typing ^A F to fit an open screen session to the window.

Change the file location in the second half of the string to the exact file location of your chosen picture.

When some console full-screen program (minicom, vi, some installers) breaks down your terminal, try this command to revert all options to "sane" settings (sane is a built-in combo of a lot of stty options)

I've been using linux for almost a decade and only recently discovered that most terminals like putty, xterm, xfree86, vt100, etc., support hundreds of shades of colors, backgrounds and text/terminal effects.

This simply prints out a ton of them, the output is pretty amazing.

If you use non-x terminals all the time like I do, it can really be helpful to know how to tweak colors and terminal capabilities. Like: