Commands tagged bash

This makes an alias for a command named 'busy'. The 'busy' command opens a random file in /usr/include to a random line with vim. Drop this in your .bash_aliases and make sure that file is initialized in your .bashrc.

file displays a files type

the -L flag means follow sym-links (as libraries are often sym-linked to another this behavior is likely preferred)

more complex behavior (*two* grep commands!) could be used to determine if the file is or is not a shared library.

Determines the flavor of a shared library by looking at the addresses of its exposed functions and seeing if they are 16 bytes or 8 bytes long. The command is written so the library you are querying is passed to a variable up font -- it would be simple to convert this to a bash function or script using this format.

First argument: string to put a box around.

Second argument: character to use for box (default is '=')

Same as command #4962, cleaned up, shortened, and more efficient. Now a ' * ' can be used as the box character, and the variables get unset so they don't mess with anything else you might have.

They marked c++ as a function for this command, but I'm not sure why. Must be a bug.

Sometimes you have a script that needs and inputfile for execution. If you don't want to create one because it may contain only one line you can use the `

This can be very usefull when working with mysql as I showed in the example code above. This will create a temporary file that is used to execute mysql and for example select all entrys from a specific database.

Turn shell tracing and verbosity (set -xv) on/off in any Bourne-type shell

If either -x or -v is set, the function turns them both off.

If neither is on, both are turned on.

Running this command turns shell tracing and shell verbose debugging on or off. Not only does it do that, it also uses your terminals builtin method of setting colors to make debugging much easier.

It looks at the current shell options contained in the $- special bash variable and that lets this function set the opposite of the current value. So from the shell you could do a:

and it will turn on debbuggin.

This is an amazingly useful function that is perfect to add system-wide by adding it to /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc.. You can run it from the shell, and you can also use it in your shell scripts like my .bash_profile - http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Bash has a great history system of its commands accessed by the ! built-in history expansion operator (documented elsewhere on this site or on the web). You can combine the ! operator inside the process redirection

Very handy.

Works recusivley in the specified dir or '.' if none given.

Repeatedly calls 'find' to find a newer file, when no newer files exist you have the newest.

In this case 'newest' means most recently modified. To find the most recently created change -newer to -cnewer.

(Apparently it is too long so I put it in sample output, I hope that is OK.)

Run the long command (or put it in your .bashrc) in sample output then run:

Voila! Your contacts' emails will appear.

Facebook seems to have gotten rid of the picture encoding of emails and replaced it with a text based version making it easy to scrape!

Needs curl to run and it was made pretty quickly so there might be bugs.

Add an alias to your .bashrc that allows you to issue the command xkcd to view (with gwenview) the newest xkcd comic... I know there are thousands of them out there but this one is at least replete with installer and also uses a more concise syntax... plus, gwenview shows you the downloading progress as it downloads the comic and gives you a more full featured viewing experience.

This version works on Mac (avoids grep -P, adding a sed step instead, and invokes /usr/bin/perl with full path in case you have another one installed).

Still requires that you install perl module HTML::Entities ? here's how: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=640489

It's the rename-tool from debians perl-package.

I realize there's a few of these out there, but none exactly in this form, which seems the cleanest to me

This function takes a word or a phrase as arguments and then fetches definitions using Google's "define" syntax. The "nl" and perl portion isn't strictly necessary. It just makes the output a bit more readable, but this also works:

If your version of grep doesn't have perl compatible regex support, then you can use this version:

The loop is to compare cookies. You can remove it...

Maybe you wanna use curl...

This version makes uses of Bash shell expansion, so it might not work in all other shells.

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