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eg:
Already running cmd
sleep 120
Substitution cmd
c=$(pgrep sleep) && sleep 5 && kill $c
There is a common command for outputting a field or list of fields from each line in a file. Why wouldn't you just use cut?
The above is an example of grabbing only the first column. You can define the start and end points specifically by chacater position using the following command:
while read l; do echo ${l:10:40}; done < three-column-list.txt > column-c10-c40.txt
Of course, it doesn't have to be a column, or extraction, it can be replacement
while read l; do echo ${l/foo/bar}; done < list-with-foo.txt > list-with-bar.txt
Read more about parameter expansion here:
http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/pe
Think of this as an alternative to awk or sed for file operations
The above is just a prove of concept based around the nested bash substitution. This could be useful in situations where you're in a directory with many filetypes but you only want to convert a few.
for f in *.bmp *.jpg *.tga; do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done
or you can use ls | egrep to get more specific... but be warned, files with spaces will cause a ruckus with expansion but the bash for loop uses a space delimited list.
for f in $(ls | egrep "bmp$|jpg$|tga$"); do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done
I'm guessing some people will still prefer doing it the sed way but I thought the concept of this one was pretty neat. It will help me remember bash substitutions a little better :-P
If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command.
# creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com
ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/`date +git-$USER@$HOSTNAME-%m-%d-%g` -C 'webmaster@askapache.com'
# /home/gpl/.ssh/git-gplnet@askapache.github.com-04-22-10
# create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory
tar -czf $(date +$HOME/.backups/%m-%d-%g-%R-`sed -u 's/\//#/g' <<< $PWD`.tgz) .
# tar -czf /home/gpl/.backups/04-22-10-01:13-#home#gpl#.rr#src.tgz .
I personally find myself having to reference
date --help
quite a bit as a result. So this nice alias saves me a lot of time. This is one bdash mofo. Works in sh and bash (posix), but will likely need to be changed for other shells due to the parameter substitution going on.. Just extend the sed command, I prefer sed to pretty much everything anyways.. but it's always preferable to put in the extra effort to go for as much builtin use as you can. Otherwise it's not a top one-liner, it's a lazyboy recliner.
Here's the old version:
alias dateh='date --help|sed "/^ *%%/,/^ *%Z/!d;s/ \+/ /g"|while read l;do date "+ %${l/% */}_${l/% */}_${l#* }";done|column -s_ -t'
This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ]
If you want all the URLs from all the sessions, you can use :
perl -lne 'print for /url":"\K[^"]+/g' ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/sessionstore.js
Thanks to tybalt89 ( idea of the "for" statement ).
For perl purists, there's JSON and File::Slurp modules, buts that's not installed by default.
In this simple example the command will add a comma to the end of every line except the last. I found this really useful when programatically constructing sql scripts. See sample output for example.
Define a function
vert () { echo $1 | grep -o '.'; }
Use it to print some column headers
paste <(vert several) <(vert parallel) <(vert vertical) <(vert "lines of") <(vert "text can") <(vert "be used") <(vert "for labels") <(vert "for columns") <(vert "of numbers")