Commands using grep (1,935)

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

Get decimal ascii code from character
the shortest command for character 'a' i know

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Get a stream feed from a Twitter user
*** CAREFULLY READ THE NOTES **** *** THIS DOES NOT WORK "OUT OF THE BOX" *** You'll need a few minutes of CAREFUL reading before making your own Twitter feed: In 2010 simple command line Twitter feed requests all stopped working because Twitter upgraded to SSL security. Https requests for a filtered Twitter stream feed now require a special header called "oauth_header". The benefit is that your stream feed and login info is securely encrypted. The bad news is that an "oauth_header" takes some work to build. Fortunately, four functions, imaginatively named step1, step2, step3 and step4 can be used to build a customized oauth_header for you in a few minutes. Now, go look at "step1" to start creating your own oauth_header!

Generate random valid mac addresses
Shorter and more straightforward. Also in perl: $ perl -e 'print join(":", map { sprintf "%0.2X",rand(256) }(1..6))."\n"'

Rename files in batch

Real full backup copy of /etc folder
Yes, rsync(1) supports local directories. And, should anything change, it's trivial to run the command again, and grab only the changes, instead of the full directory.

Export a subset of a database
Limits the number of rows per table to X

List all Windows services on the command line
On Windows 2000 or later, this command will give a listing of all the registered Windows services. You can then know what the name of a command is in order to start and stop it. e.g. $ sc start Apache2.2 or $ net start Apache2.2 Please note that sc will allow the SERVICE_NAME only, while net will allow both SERVICE_NAME and DISPLAY_NAME. Note that the space between the = and the next word are important. Not very unixy, that. http://www.ss64.com/nt/sc.html http://www.ss64.com/nt/net_service.html http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490995.aspx

Find out current working directory of a process
This is an alternative to another command using two xargs. If it's a command you know there's only one of, you can just use: $ ls -l /proc/$(pgrep COMMAND)/cwd

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.


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: