Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2012-05-20 - test
test
2012-05-20 - test
test
2012-05-20 - test
test
2012-05-20 - Test tweets
YU not working?
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands using awk

Commands using awk from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using awk - 839 results
awk -F'\t' '{print $0 >>$5.tsv}'
2012-05-16 18:18:16
User: pykler
Functions: awk
Tags: awk split tsv
0
Up
Down
Split tsv file by fifth column ... or any column

Will split the std input lines into files grouped by the 5th column content.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ip li | grep ether | awk '{print $2}'
2012-05-14 23:22:18
User: minigeek
Functions: awk grep
0
Up
Down
Find Mac address
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cal 04 2012 | awk '{ $7 && X=$7 } END { print X }'
2012-05-06 23:43:21
User: flatcap
Functions: awk cal
Tags: Date manipulation awk date cal
2
Up
Down
Get the date for the last Saturday of a given month

If your locale has Monday as the first day of the week, like mine in the UK, change the two $7 into $6

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cal 04 2012 | awk 'NF <= 7 { print $7 }' | grep -v "^$" | tail -1
2012-05-03 16:57:45
User: javidjamae
Functions: awk cal grep tail
Tags: Date manipulation awk tail grep date dates cal
-2
Up
Down
Get the date for the last Saturday of a given month

This is a little trickier than finding the last Sunday, because you know the last Sunday is in the first position of the last line. The trick is to use the NF less than or equal to 7 so it picks up all the lines then grep out any empty lines.

Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in *.txt; do j=`mktemp | awk -F. '{print $2".txt"}'`; mv "$i" "$j"; done
2012-04-17 17:13:32
User: yepitsken
Functions: awk mv
Tags: mktemp,awk,rename
0
Up
Down
Rename files with unique, randomly generated file names

A simple way to rename a set of files to a unique, randomized file name.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cal | egrep -e '^ [0-9]|^[0-9]' | tr '\n' ' ' | awk '{print $NF}'
2012-04-16 11:58:09
User: gouverney
Functions: awk cal egrep tr
0
Up
Down
Returns last day of current month

Returns last day of current month. Useful to implement a bash script backup based on a GFS strategy.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
git remote -v | grep fetch | sed 's/\(.*github.com\)[:|/]\(.*\).git (fetch)/\2/' | awk {'print "https://github.com/" $1'} | xargs open
2012-04-15 20:48:46
User: brockangelo
Functions: awk grep sed xargs
Tags: git sed alias xargs github
1
Up
Down
Open the current project on Github by typing gh

Written for Mac OSX. When you are working in a project and want to open it on Github.com, just type "gh" and your default browser will open with the repo you are in. Works for submodules, and repo's that you don't own.

You'll need to copy / paste this command into a gh.sh file, then create an alias in your bash or zsh profile to the gh.sh script. Detailed instructions here if you still need help:

http://gist.github.com/1917716

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn stat | grep ^\! | awk '{print $2}' | xargs svn del
2012-04-13 12:13:37
User: johanadriaans
Functions: awk grep stat xargs
0
Up
Down
Remove all missing SVN files from the repository

Sometimes cache-files or garbage gets added to your SVN repository. This is the way I normally clean up those when the actual files are already gone.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
diff -Naur /source/path /target/path --brief | awk '{print "cp " $2 " " $4}' | sh
2012-04-13 12:07:20
User: johanadriaans
Functions: awk diff
0
Up
Down
Copy all file differences to an existing mirror location

I use this a lot to sync changes between folders that don't share a SVN or GIT repository. If you want to preview the command before executing, just leave out the last part ("| sh")

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for a in $(find . -xdev -type f -printf '%i\n'|sort|uniq -d);do find . -xdev -inum $a -printf '%s %i %m %n %U %G %AD %Ar %p\n';done|sort -n|awk '{if(x!=$2){print "---"};x=$2;print $0}'
2012-04-09 12:52:07
User: knoppix5
Functions: awk find sort uniq
0
Up
Down
Sort by size all hardlinked files in the current directory (and subdirectories)

The listing will be nice separated with dashes in chunks of identical files.

Output format:

Size Inode Mode Count_of_identical_files UID GID Date Time Path/Filename

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
yes "" | cat -n | awk '{print "S=`echo All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. | cut -c",($1 - 1) % 43 + 1 "`;echo -n \"$S\";seq 500000 > /dev/null"}'| bash
2012-04-08 07:53:43
User: nati
Functions: awk cat yes
1
Up
Down
The scene in the Shining (Stanley Kubrick)

Let's take a rest.

How about watch a horror?

The Shining

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(film)

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for k in $(git branch | sed /\*/d); do echo "$(git log -1 --pretty=format:"%ct" $k) $k"; done | sort -r | awk '{print $2}'
2012-04-07 11:19:00
User: dahuie
Functions: awk echo sed sort
Tags: bash git sed awk
0
Up
Down
Show git branches by date - useful for showing active branches

Simpler and without all of the coloring gimmicks. This just returns a list of branches with the most recent first. This should be useful for cleaning your remotes.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"}{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head
2012-04-03 06:33:47
User: hogofogo
Functions: awk sort uniq
0
Up
Down
Top 10 commands used
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo apt-get remove $(dpkg -l|awk '/^ii linux-image-/{print $2}'|sed 's/linux-image-//'|awk -v v=`uname -r` 'v>$0'|sed 's/-generic//'|awk '{printf("linux-headers-%s\nlinux-headers-%s-generic\nlinux-image-%s-generic\n",$0,$0,$0)}')
2012-04-02 10:53:40
User: mtron
Functions: awk sed sudo
Tags: Debian Linux awk grep kernel dpkg aptitude
0
Up
Down
Remove all unused kernels with apt-get

small update for this command to work with linux kernels 3.x

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
apt-get -s upgrade | awk '/[0-9]+ upgraded,/ {print $1 " package updates are available"}'
2012-03-29 17:04:32
User: lpanebr
Functions: apt awk
Tags: apt-get upgrade
2
Up
Down
List total available upgrades from apt without upgrading the system

This let's you find out the total packages that have available upgrades. Usefull if you want to check or show the total available upgrades on your system.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | awk '$11!~/\[*\]/ {print $6/1024" Mb --> "$11,$12,$13,$14}' | sort -g
2012-03-23 20:59:33
User: dererk
Functions: awk ps sort
1
Up
Down
"What the hell is running on?!" Easily snoop your system's RAM consumption

Works on most unixes, on OpenBSD replace the "-g" parameter at the sort with a "-n".

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps h --ppid $(cat /var/run/apache2.pid) | awk '{print"-p " $1}' | xargs sudo strace
2012-03-21 01:59:41
User: colinmollenhour
Functions: awk cat ps sudo xargs
Tags: awk apache ps strace
0
Up
Down
easily strace all your apache *child* processes

Like the original version except it does not include the parent apache process or the grep process and adds "sudo" so it can be run by user.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
curl -s mobile.twitter.com/search | sed -n '/trend_footer_list/,/\ul>/p' | awk -F\> '{print $3}' | awk -F\< '{print $1}' | sed '/^$/d'
2012-03-15 17:17:06
User: articmonkey
Functions: awk sed
Tags: twitter awk curl
0
Up
Down
Print trending topics on Twitter

Prints top 5 twitter topics. Not very well written at all but none of the others worked.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
du -s $(ls -l | grep '^d' | awk '{print $9}') | sort -nr
2012-03-15 09:04:13
User: j3ffyang
Functions: awk du grep ls sort
Tags: sort du
0
Up
Down
Find and sort out folders by size
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
adb shell ps | grep my.app.packagename | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -I ? sh -c "adb logcat -v time | grep ?"
2012-03-14 10:02:11
User: jackpatmos
Functions: awk grep ps sh xargs
Tags: adb
0
Up
Down
Filter Android log output by PID
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
free -m | awk '/cache:/ {print $4}'
2012-03-13 19:54:26
User: felixhummel
Functions: awk free
Tags: ram free
0
Up
Down
Print free RAM in MB

Does not output the word "shared" so you can easily store this number in a variable.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /path/to/dir -iname "*.ext" -print0 | xargs -0 mplayer -really-quiet -cache 64 -vo dummy -ao dummy -identify 2>/dev/null | awk '/ID_LENGTH/{gsub(/ID_LENGTH=/,"")}{SUM += $1}END{ printf "%02d:%02d:%02d\n",SUM/3600,SUM%3600/60,SUM%60}'
2012-03-11 12:28:48
User: DarkSniper
Functions: awk find printf xargs
Tags: video audio mplayer awk find
0
Up
Down
Get the total length of all video / audio in the current dir (and below) in H:m:s

Improvement on Coderjoe's Solution. Gets rid of grep and cut (and implements them in awk) and specifies some different mplayer options that speed things up a bit.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
aspectRatio () { for i in `seq 1 1000 `; do awk "BEGIN {print $1/$i, $2/$i}"; done |grep -v "\."; }
2012-03-07 06:22:25
User: totti
Functions: awk grep
Tags: resolution image aspect ratio
0
Up
Down
Aspect ratio of a resolution

EG: aspectRatio 1920 1200

For display a image in full screen it should be in any of the resolution obtained from the output. So resize an image to any of it and you can display it in full screen

For general aspect ratio :

aspectRatio () { for i in `seq 1 1000 `; do awk "BEGIN {print $1/$i, $2/$i}"; done |grep -v "\." |tail -1; }
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
awk 'FNR==100 {print;exit}' file
2012-03-04 20:25:57
User: Testuser_01
Functions: awk
Tags: awk time LINES
0
Up
Down
Output specific line in a very big file and exit afterwards

This will save parsing time for operations on very big files.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
head -n1 nation.tbl | sed 's/\(.\)/\1\n/g' | sort | uniq -c | grep \| | awk '{ print $1 }'
2012-03-03 12:35:58
User: maarten
Functions: awk grep head sed sort uniq
0
Up
Down
Count Number of Columns in TPC-H table-file (or any pipe seperated file
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate