Commands using head (314)

  • Get the user with the top number of logins

    Get an approximation of who the workstation is assigned to. You can wrap it in su - "$()" if you want to log into a shell as that user. Show Sample Output


    0
    last | grep -i console | grep -iv 'root' | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | awk '{print $2}' | head -1
    phyxia · 2015-07-20 18:07:40 10
  • Generate a random string (for password, hash or whatever)

    Useful when you need to generate password or random hash string. If you need longer string adjust parameter for "head -c 20" Show Sample Output


    0
    dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1k count=1 2>/dev/null|LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789!@#%^&*(-_=+)'|head -c 20
    nitrogear · 2015-07-25 21:24:28 9
  • ps to show child thread PIDs


    0
    ls -1 /proc/$(ps ax | grep <Process Name> | head -n 1 | awk '{print $1;}')/task | tail -n +2
    happymarmoset · 2015-10-06 07:44:48 10
  • Shows which commands you use the most.


    0
    cut -f1 -d" " ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 30
    kenorb · 2015-10-09 16:11:37 10
  • Extract the URL of the first mp3 out of a podcast xml feed and add it it to current mpd playlist

    Quick way to get the URL of the most recent audio file out of a podcast xml feed without any fancy xml parsing tools. Just curl, grep and head


    0
    mpc add `curl -s http://link.to/podcast/feed.xml | grep -o 'https*://[^"]*mp3' | head -1`
    tbon3r · 2015-10-11 09:17:35 9
  • yet another random password generator.

    this one includes special characters. note some some chars may be disallowed on windows systems. *nix will allow pretty much any character in a password except a carriage return. you do not want non printing characters in your password, so this is limited to the printable chars displayed on a keyboard , less space and return. edited to fix minor typo Show Sample Output


    0
    tr -dc '[:print:]' < /dev/urandom | fold -w10 |head -n1 |sed 's/ //g'
    wr250 · 2016-01-09 13:43:16 12
  • Returns the N most recently modified files from anywhere 'below' (and including) the current working directory, in order, with details.

    Returns a list, with attributes (think `ls -l`), in reverse chronological order. N is a single numeric parameter. Robust against unfriendly filenames and directory structures. Show Sample Output


    0
    nmf() { find . -type f -printf '%T@ ' -print0 -printf '\n' | sort -rn | head -"$1" | cut -f2- -d" " | tr -d "\0" | tr "\n" "\0" | xargs -0 ls -Ulh; }
    incidentnormal · 2016-03-04 14:53:14 12
  • Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage

    Display the top processes sorted by memory usage. This is mostly useful because it's easy to remember and can give me a quick 'top' view of a group of servers when used over pssh. (Though I'd recommend |head -10 to minimize the output). Show Sample Output


    0
    top -b -o +%MEM |head -17
    dak1n1 · 2016-03-16 22:14:34 12
  • Convert json files to tsv text blob

    Grabs the first JSON file in the directory, reads its keys, prints TSV, then prints all the json files' values as TSV. Nested objects appear as json. Unhappy times if your json has literal tabs in it. Show Sample Output


    0
    jq -r 'keys | join("\t")' $(ls -f *.json | head -1) && jq -Sr 'to_entries | [ .[] | .value | tostring ] | join("\t")' *.json
    drjeats · 2016-04-08 23:30:30 12
  • List latest 5 modified files recursively

    This command will find any named file types in / between two dates then will list all the metadata of those files in long format and human readable form. Adding a 't' flag to the ls command sorts the files by modified time. After all that the head -5 lists the first 5 which can be changed.


    0
    ls -laht `find / -name "*.*" -type f -newermt "2016-04-05" ! -newermt "2016-04-10"`|head -5
    ubercoo · 2016-04-19 14:26:23 10
  • Finding commands to create alias for

    by determining most popular use in history using percentage . Show Sample Output


    0
    history | awk '{CMD[$2]++;count++;}END { for (a in CMD)print CMD[a] " " CMD[a]/count*100 "% " a;}' | grep -v "./" | column -c3 -s " " -t | sort -nr | nl | head -n10
    turrtle13 · 2016-04-24 17:21:35 9
  • Password server

    This server can be access by a browser or other remote terminal with ncat. I have to use de test && break to allow ctrl-c to close. Show Sample Output


    0
    while [ 1 ]; do cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc ' -~' | head -c 10 | ncat -l 8080 &> /dev/null; test $? -gt 128 && break; done
    xxjcaxx · 2016-05-04 14:36:47 10
  • sorta apache logs by ip frequency


    0
    cat access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20
    prees · 2016-05-05 20:52:03 13
  • This command watches the top 10 processes currently taking up the most memory with thread & other info, incase you don't want to use the TOP or HTOP command.

    This is a alternate command I like to use instead of TOP or HTOP to see what are the processes which are taking up the most memory on a system. It shows the username, process ID, CPU usage, Memory usage, thread ID, Number of threads associated with parent process, Resident Set Size, Virtual Memory Size, start time of the process, and command arguments. Then it's sorted by memory and showing the top 10 with head. This of course can be changed to suit you needs. I have a small system which is why Firefox is taking so much resources. Show Sample Output


    0
    watch -n .8 'ps -eaLo uname,pid,pcpu,pmem,lwp,nlwp,rss,vsz,start_time,args --sort -pmem| head -10'
    ubercoo · 2016-05-11 01:05:53 11
  • Find top 10 largest files in /var directory (including subdirectories)


    0
    find /var -type f -exec du -h {} \; | sort -rh | head -10
    jiananmail · 2016-05-31 00:21:32 10
  • who is the console user?

    Finds the login id of the user that owns the console. I use it to reset my touchpad after resume from suspend in /etc/pm/sleep.d/s99local


    0
    who | grep :0 | head -1 | cut -d " " -f 1
    mikef5410 · 2016-06-22 17:33:38 12
  • Find 20 most frequently-used shell commands from (bash history)


    0
    tr "\|\;" "\n" < ~/.bash_history | sed -e "s/^ //g" | cut -d " " -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20
    turrtle13 · 2016-07-01 19:27:12 10
  • Display the top ten running processes sorted by the memory usage:


    0
    ps aux | awk '{if ($5 != 0 ) print $2,$5,$6,$11}' | sort -k2rn | head -10 | column -t
    turrtle13 · 2016-07-01 19:40:56 12
  • sort of automaticly install gems that are depend

    When bundle install sucks ...This runs isuckat_ruby.rb and when stderror matches find gem ' it will gem install what ever is missing ... Show Sample Output


    0
    gem install `ruby ./isuckat_ruby.rb 2>&1 | sed -e 's/.*find gem .//g' -e 's/ .*//g' | head -n 1`
    operat0r · 2016-08-03 19:41:27 13
  • Last shutdown date and time of a system


    0
    last -x | grep shutdown | head -1
    creepyjones · 2016-08-10 21:51:48 12
  • simulate Simultaneous connections with curl

    to simulating connections Simultaneous to specific server adress to test penetrations Show Sample Output


    0
    for i in {0..60}; do (curl -Is http://46.101.214.181:10101 | head -n1 &) 2>/dev/null; sleep 1; done;
    aysadk · 2017-01-15 14:32:02 16
  • stress test curl 60 connection simulate


    0
    for i in {0..60}; do (curl -Is http://<domain/ip> | head -n1 &) 2>/dev/null; sleep 1; done;
    aysadk · 2017-01-24 02:47:13 13
  • Find the top most 5 duplicate files in a folder

    To allow recursivity : find -type f -exec md5sum '{}' ';' | sort | uniq -c -w 33 | sort -gr | head -n 5 | cut -c1-7,41- Display only filenames : find -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec md5sum '{}' ';' | sort | uniq -c -w 33 | sort -gr | head -n 5 | cut -c43- Show Sample Output


    0
    find -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec md5sum '{}' ';' | sort | uniq -c -w 33 | sort -gr | head -n 5 | cut -c1-7,41-
    MaDCOw · 2017-02-09 11:36:31 18
  • Print nicely in columns a chunk of text that is separated by tab


    0
    head filename.txt | column -t -s $'\t'
    NLKNguyen · 2017-02-10 23:26:10 20
  • Execute the last line of output from the previous command

    alex@alex-box:~$ sl The program 'sl' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install sl alex@alex-box:~$ dolast Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: sl 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.


    0
    alias dolast='$( $(history 2| head -n 1| sed "s/.* //") 2>&1 | tail -n 1)'
    aheinous · 2017-02-25 01:26:49 19
  • ‹ First  < 8 9 10 11 12 >  Last ›

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

Find Files That Exceed a Specified Size Limit

drop first column of output by piping to this
An advantage is that this doesn't modify remained string at all. One can change {0,1} with {0,n} to drop several columns

computes the most frequent used words of a text file
using $ cat WAR_AND_PEACE_By_LeoTolstoi.txt | tr -cs "[:alnum:]" "\n"| tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | sort -S16M | uniq -c |sort -nr | cat -n | head -n 30 ("sort -S1G" - Linux/GNU sort only) will also do the job but as some drawbacks (caused by space/time complexity of sorting) for bigger files...

Find all active ip's in a subnet

Display the history and optionally grep
Place this in your .bash_profile and you can use it two different ways. If you issue 'h' on its own, then it acts like the history command. If you issue: $ h cd Then it will display all the history with the word 'cd'

Normalize volume in your mp3 library
This normalizes volume in your mp3 library, but uses mp3gain's "album" mode. This applies a gain change to all files from each directory (which are presumed to be from the same album) - so their volume relative to one another is changed, while the average album volume is normalized. This is done because if one track from an album is quieter or louder than the others, it was probably meant to be that way.

Show total size of each subdirectory, broken down by KB,MB,GB,TB

Show the command line for a PID with ps
Show the command line for a PID with ps

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Show IP Address in prompt --> PS1 var
when working with many machines in a computer lab need to know the IP addr is very large, this is a simplistic solution to make things easier

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: