Commands using sed (1,319)

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

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"

Numeric zero padding file rename
This uses Perl's rename utility (you may have to call it as prename on your box) and won't choke on spaces or other characters in filenames. It will also zero pad a number even in filenames like "vacation-4.jpg".

Pick a random line from a file

Prettify an XML file
Like `tidy`, `xmllint` can be used to prettify XML files. The --nsclean option is also useful to remove redundant namespaces.

More precise BASH debugging

Print every Nth line (to a maximum)
Thanks to knoppix5 for the idea :-) Print selected lines from a file or the output of a command. Usage: $ every NTH MAX [FILE] Print every NTH line (from the first MAX lines) of FILE. If FILE is omitted, stdin is used. The command simply passes the input to a sed script: $ sed -n -e "${2}q" -e "0~${1}p" ${3:-/dev/stdin} print no output $ sed -n quit after this many lines (controlled by the second parameter) $ -e "${2}q" print every NTH line (controlled by the first parameter) $ -e "0~${1}p" take input from $3 (if it exists) otherwise use /dev/stdin ${3:-/dev/stdin}

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

download file1 file2 file3 file4 .... file 100

Check the age of the filesystem
Very useful set of commands to know when your file system was created.

Email an svn dump
Dumps a compressed svn backup to a file, and emails the files along with any messages as the body of the email


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: