Commands using awk (1,418)

What's this?

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

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

IBM AIX: Extract a .tar.gz archive in one shot
This command is for UNIX OSes that have plain vanilla System V UNIX commands instead of their more functional GNU counterparts, such as IBM AIX.

list the top 15 folders by decreasing size in MB
list the top 15 folders by decreasing size in MB

Using parcellite, indents the content of the clipboard manager
This command takes the content of a Parcellite-managed clipboard manager and add one level of indentation to it. It may be useful to indent a block of code which will enter inside another, already indented one but I use it mostly to indent code I will post in Stack Overflow questions and answers.

Find running binary executables that were not installed using dpkg
This helped me find a botnet that had made into my system. Of course, this is not a foolproof or guarantied way to find all of them or even most of them. But it helped me find it.

Edit the last or previous command line in an editor then execute
If you would like to edit a previous command, which might be long and complicated, you can use the fc (I think it stands for fix command). Invoke fc alone will edit the last command using the default editor (specified by $FCEDIT, $EDITOR, or emacs, in that order). After you make the changes in the editor, save and exit to execute that command. The fc command is more flexible than what I have described. Please 'man bash' for more information.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

pngcrush all .png files in the directory
Find all pngs in directory structure and pngcrush them, none destructive. You can just remove the "{}.crush" part if you want destructive.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Lists all usernames in alphabetical order

Upgrading packages. Pacman can update all packages on the system with just one command. This could take quite a while depending on how up-to-date the system is. This command can synchronize the repository databases and update the system's packages.
Warning: Instead of immediately updating as soon as updates are available, users must recognize that due to the nature of Arch's rolling release approach, an update may have unforeseen consequences. This means that it is not wise to update if, for example, one is about to deliver an important presentation. Rather, update during free time and be prepared to deal with any problems that may arise. Pacman is a powerful package management tool, but it does not attempt to handle all corner cases. Read The Arch Way if this causes confusion. Users must be vigilant and take responsibility for maintaining their own system. When performing a system update, it is essential that users read all information output by pacman and use common sense. If a user-modified configuration file needs to be upgraded for a new version of a package, a .pacnew file will be created to avoid overwriting settings modified by the user. Pacman will prompt the user to merge them. These files require manual intervention from the user and it is good practice to handle them right after every package upgrade or removal. See Pacnew and Pacsave Files for more info. Tip: Remember that pacman's output is logged in /var/log/pacman.log.


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: