Commands tagged unix

This is a handy way to circumvent the "Maximum line length of 2048 exceeded" grep error.

Once you have run the above command (or put it in your .bashrc), files can be searched using:

If you can install rpl it's simpler to use and faster than combinations of find, grep and sed.

See man rpl for various options.

time on above operation: real 0m0.862s, user 0m0.548s, sys 0m0.180s

using find + sed: real 0m3.546s, user 0m1.752s, sys 0m1.580s

A shell function using perl to easily convert Unix-time to text.

Put in in your ~/.bashrc or equivalent.

Tested on Linux / Solaris Bourne, bash and zsh. using perl 5.6 and higher.

(Does not require GNU date like some other commands)

adding users to groups on OS X is not a straightforward process, you need to use the new in built in Directory Service command line utility...

For Mac OS X users only

Sqlite database keeps collecting cruft as time passes, which can be cleaned by the 'vacuum;' command. This command cleans up the cruft in all sqlite files relating to the user you have logged in as. This command has to be run when firefox is not running, or it will exit displaying the pid of the firefox running.

Whereas ^V is CTRL-V.

converts a dos file to unix by removing 0x13 characters

This command displays a clock on your terminal which updates the time every second. Press Ctrl-C to exit.

A couple of variants:

A little bit bigger text:

You can try other figlet fonts, too.

Big sideways characters:

This requires a particular version of banner and a 40-line terminal or you can adjust the width ("30" here).

See smbstatus Output within a 5 second interval (for monitoring smb access)

This is a working version, though probably clumsy, of the script submitted by felix001. This works on ubuntu and CygWin. This would be great as a bash function, defined in .bashrc. Additionally it would work as a script put in the path.

the middle command between the ; and ; is the vi commands that insert that line into the last line of the file, the esc with the carets is literally hitting the escape key, you have to have the smbfs package installed to do it, I use it to access my iTunes music on my mac from my linux PC's with amarok so I can play the music anywhere in the house. among other things, it allows you to access the files on that share from your computer anytime you're on that network.

Depending on the installation only certain of these man pages are installed. 12 is left out on purpose because ISO/IEC 8859-12 does not exist. To also access those manpages that are not installed use opera (or any other browser that supports all the character sets involved) to display online versions of the manpages hosted at kernel.org:

Let me suggest using wget for obtaining the HTTP header only as the last resort because it generates considerable textual overhead. The first ellipsis of the sample output stands for

Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.

--2009-03-31 20:42:46-- http://www.example.com/

Resolving www.example.com... 208.77.188.166

Connecting to www.example.com|208.77.188.166|:80... connected.

HTTP request sent, awaiting response...

and the second one looks for

Length: 438 [text/html]

Remote file exists and could contain further links,

but recursion is disabled -- not retrieving.

Without the -dump option the header is displayed in lynx. You can also use w3m, the command then is

In the above example 'muspi merol' (the output of the first rev command) is sent to stderr and 'lorem ipsum' (the output of the second rev command) is sent to stdout. rev reverse lines of a file or files. This use of tee allows testing if a program correctly handles its input without using files that hold the data.

rot13 maps a..mn..z (A..MN..Z) to n..za..m (n..za..m) and so does this alias.

An improved version of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1772/simple-countdown-from-a-given-date that uses Perl to pretty-print the output. Note that the GNU-style '--no-title' option has been replaced by its one-letter counterpart '-t'.

Here $HOME/shots must exist and have appropriate access rights and sitecopy must be correctly set up to upload new screen shots to the remote site.

Example .sitecopyrc (for illustration purposes only)

site shots

server ftp.example.com

username user

password antabakadesuka

local /home/penpen/shots

remote public_html/shots

permissions ignore

The command uses scrot to create a screen shot, moves it to the screen shot directory, uploads it using screen uses xsel to copy the URL to the paste buffer (so that you can paste it with a middle click) and finally uses feh to display a preview of the screen shot.

Note that $BASE stands for the base URL for the screen shots on the remote server, replace it by the actual location; in the example http://www.example.com/~user/shots would be fitting.

Assign this command to a key combination or an icon in whatever panel you use.

A web server using $HOME/public_html as user directory is required, $HOME/public_html/shots must exist and have appropriate access rights and $HOSTNAME must be known to and accessible from the outside world.

The command uses scrot to create a screen shot, moves it to the screen shot directory, uses xsel to copy the URL to the paste buffer (so that you can paste it with a middle click) and finally uses feh to display a preview of the screen shot.

Assign this command to a key combination or an icon in whatever panel you use.

Have netcat listen on port 8000, point browser to http://localhost:8000/ and you see the information sent. netcat terminates as soon as your browser disconnects.

I tested this command on my Fedora box but linuxrawkstar pointed out that he needs to use

instead. This depends on the netcat version you use. The additional '-p' is required by GNU netcat that for example is used by Debian but not by the OpenBSD netcat port used by my Fedora system.