Commands using head (314)

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

A command to post a message and an auto-shortened link to Twitter. The link shortening service is provide by TinyURL.
A command to post a message and an auto-shortened link to Twitter. The link shortening service is provided by TinyURL.

Discovering all open files/dirs underneath a directory
It may be helpful in case you need to umount a directory and some process is preventing you to do so keeping the folder busy. The lsof may process the +D option slowly and may require a significant amount of memory because it will descend the full dir tree. On the other hand it will neither follow symlinks nor other file systems.

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

shell function to underline a given string.
underline() will print $1, followed by a series of '=' characters the width of $1. An optional second argument can be used to replace '=' with a given character. This function is useful for breaking lots of data emitted in a for loop into sections which are easier to parse visually. Let's say that 'xxxx' is a very common pattern occurring in a group of CSV files. You could run $ grep xxxx *.csv This would print the name of each csv file before each matching line, but the output would be hard to parse visually. $ for i in *.csv; do printf "\n"; underline $i; grep "xxxx" $i; done Will break the output into sections separated by the name of the file, underlined.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Using mplayer to play the audio only but suppress the video

Command to logout all the users in one command
This command logs out all users - which is way more secure to use ps -ef and "grep" to kill processes. Never ever use ps -ef piped to grep to kill something. If you ever need to ps-something use the UNIX95-directive, which makes sure you will never need "grep" together with "ps".

Display the output of a command from the first line until the first instance of a regular expression.
If BREs can be used, this sed version will also get the job done.

is today the end of the month?

Get the full path of a bash script's Git repository head.
Rather than complicated and fragile paths relative to a script like "../../other", this command will retrieve the full path of the file's repository head. Safe with spaces in directory names. Works within a symlinked directory. Broken down: $cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" temporarily changes directories within this expansion. Double quoted "$(dirname" and ")" with unquoted ${BASH_SOURCE[0]} allows spaces in the path. $git rev-parse --show-toplevel gets the full path of the repository head of the current working directory, which was temporarily changed by the "cd".


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: