Commands using sed (1,319)

  • This will generate 3 paragraphs with random text. Change the 3 to any number. Show Sample Output


    5
    lynx -source http://www.lipsum.com/feed/xml?amount=3|perl -p -i -e 's/\n/\n\n/g'|sed -n '/<lipsum>/,/<\/lipsum>/p'|sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g'
    houghi · 2010-04-26 17:26:44 5
  • This command will format your alias or function to a single line, trimming duplicate white space and newlines and inserting delimiter semi-colons, so it continues to work on a single line. Show Sample Output


    5
    goclf() { type "$1" | sed '1d' | tr -d "\n" | tr -s '[:space:]'; echo }
    meathive · 2010-06-26 21:44:17 17
  • Tired copy paste to get opcode from objdump huh ? Get more @ http://gunslingerc0de.wordpress.com Show Sample Output


    5
    objdump -d ./PROGRAM|grep '[0-9a-f]:'|grep -v 'file'|cut -f2 -d:|cut -f1-6 -d' '|tr -s ' '|tr '\t' ' '|sed 's/ $//g'|sed 's/ /\\x/g'|paste -d '' -s |sed 's/^/"/'|sed 's/$/"/g'
    gunslinger_ · 2010-07-11 15:44:48 112
  • If you're going to use od, here's how to suppress the labels at the beginning. Also, it doesn't output the \x, hence the sed command at the end. Remove it for space separated hex values instead Show Sample Output


    5
    echo -n "text" | od -A n -t x1 |sed 's/ /\\x/g'
    camocrazed · 2010-07-14 15:31:36 8

  • 5
    sed -r "s:\x1B\[[0-9;]*[mK]::g"'
    roylez · 2010-07-22 05:37:25 6
  • Default output-file is "liveh.txt". This uses only BRE, in case you're using an older version of sed(1) that doesn't have support for ERE added. With a modern sed(1), to reduce false positive matches, you might do something like: liveh(){ tcpdump -lnnAs512 -i ${1-} tcp |sed 's/.*GET /GET /;s/.*Host: /Host: /;s/.*POST /POST /;/GET |Host: |POST /!d;/[\"'"'"]/d;/\.\./d;w '"${2-liveh.txt}"'' >/dev/null ;} Anyway, it's easy to clean up the output file with sed(1) later.


    5
    liveh(){ tcpdump -lnAs512 ${1-} tcp |sed ' s/.*GET /GET /;s/.*Host: /Host: /;s/.*POST /POST /;/[GPH][EOo][TSs]/!d;w '"${2-liveh.txt}"' ' >/dev/null ;} # usage: liveh [-i interface] [output-file] && firefox &
    argv · 2010-10-11 01:01:11 3
  • substitute "example" with desired string; tl = target language (en, fr, de, hu, ...); you can leave sl parameter as-is (autodetection works fine) Show Sample Output


    5
    wget -U "Mozilla/5.0" -qO - "http://translate.google.com/translate_a/t?client=t&text=translation+example&sl=auto&tl=fr" | sed 's/\[\[\[\"//' | cut -d \" -f 1
    sairon · 2011-03-06 13:46:16 109
  • Modify file in place to remove empty lines and create a backup of the original with the extension .bak Show Sample Output


    5
    sed -e '/^$/d' -i .bak filewithempty.lines
    donnoman · 2011-03-24 00:03:25 6
  • Gets a BOFH excuse from the BOFH excuse server (towel.blinkenlights.nl port 666), and passes it through sed and tr to get rid of telnet connection stuff. Show Sample Output


    5
    telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 666 | sed "s/=== The BOFH Excuse Server ===//" | tr -d '\n' && echo
    hintss · 2011-03-31 05:50:57 3
  • This command outputs a table of sighting opportunities for the International Space Station. Find the URL for your city here: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/ Show Sample Output


    5
    links -dump "http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/view.cgi?country=United_States&region=Wisconsin&city=Portage" | sed -n '/--/,/--/p'
    eightmillion · 2011-05-03 12:15:56 7
  • usage: mem memcache-command [arguments] where memcache-command might be: set add get[s] append prepend replace delete incr decr cas stats verbosity version notes: exptime argument is set to 0 (no expire) flags argument is set to 1 (arbitrary)


    5
    mem(){ { case $1 in st*|[vgid]*) printf "%s " "$@";; *) dd if=$3 2>&1|sed '$!d;/^0/d;s/ .*//;s/^/'"$1"' '"$2"' 1 0 /; r '"$3"'' 2>/dev/null;;esac;printf "\r\nquit\r\n";}|nc -n 127.0.0.1 11211; }
    argv · 2011-06-17 06:39:07 6
  • Using the sed -i (inline), you can replace the beginning of the first line of a file without redirecting the output to a temporary location.


    5
    sed -i '1s/^/text to prepend\n/' file1
    xeor · 2011-06-25 12:02:11 14
  • - grep for the word in a files, use recursion (to find files in sub directories), and list only file matches -| xargs passes the results from the grep command to sed -sed -i uses a regular expression (regex) to evaluate the change: s (search) / search word / target word / g (global replace)


    5
    grep -lr -e '<oldword>' * | xargs sed -i 's/<oldword>/<newword>/g'
    o0110o · 2011-08-27 02:42:51 7
  • This should work with anything://url.whatever etc etc ;)


    5
    sed "s/\([a-zA-Z]*\:\/\/[^ ]*\)\(.*\)/\<a href=\"\1\"\>\1\<\/a\>\2/"
    c3w · 2012-01-04 02:08:29 7
  • pgrep foo may return several pids for process foobar footy01 etc. like this: 11427 12576 12577 sed puts "-p " in front and we pass a list to top: top -p 11427 -p 12576 -p 12577


    5
    top $(pgrep foo | sed 's|^|-p |g')
    michelsberg · 2012-06-14 15:13:00 3
  • This makes your commandlinefu.com's favorites appear as most recent commands in your history.


    5
    (cat ~/.bash_history;U='curl -s www.commandlinefu.com';$U/users/signin -c/tmp/.c -d'username=<USER>&password=<PASS>&submit=1'|$U/commands/favourites/json -b/tmp/.c|grep -Po 'nd":.*?[^\\]",'|sed -re 's/.*":"(.*)",/\1/g')>~/.h;HISTFILE=~/.h bash --login
    xenomuta · 2012-08-17 12:31:51 34
  • (Please see sample output for usage) script.bash is your script, which will be crypted to script.secure script.bash --> script.secure You can execute script.secure only if you know the password. If you die, your script dies with you. If you modify the startup line, be careful with the offset calculation of the crypted block (the XX string). Not difficult to make script editable (an offset-dd piped to a gpg -d piped to a vim - piped to a gpg -c directed to script.new ), but not enough space to do it on a one liner. Show Sample Output


    5
    echo "eval \"\$(dd if=\$0 bs=1 skip=XX 2>/dev/null|gpg -d 2>/dev/null)\"; exit" > script.secure; sed -i s:XX:$(stat -c%s script.secure): script.secure; gpg -c < script.bash >> script.secure; chmod +x script.secure
    rodolfoap · 2013-03-09 11:16:48 20
  • Automatically drops mount points that have non-numeric sizes (e.g. /proc). Tested in bash on Linux and AIX. Show Sample Output


    5
    for m in `df -P | awk -F ' ' '{print $NF}' | sed -e "1d"`;do n=`df -P | grep "$m$" | awk -F ' ' '{print $5}' | cut -d% -f1`;i=0;if [[ $n =~ ^-?[0-9]+$ ]];then printf '%-25s' $m;while [ $i -lt $n ];do echo -n '=';let "i=$i+1";done;echo " $n";fi;done
    drockney · 2013-07-29 20:12:39 6
  • Opposite: Convert an one-liner to script: foo() { <one-liner> ; } ... typeset -f foo ... unset -f foo


    5
    (sed 's/#.*//g'|sed '/^ *$/d'|tr '\n' ';'|xargs echo) < script.sh
    knoppix5 · 2013-10-26 23:23:51 16
  • Show the current load of the CPU as a percentage. Read the load from /proc/loadavg and convert it using sed: Strip everything after the first whitespace: sed -e 's/ .*//' Delete the decimal point: sed -e 's/\.//' Remove leading zeroes: sed -e 's/^0*//' Show Sample Output


    5
    sed -e 's/ .*//' -e 's/\.//' -e 's/^0*//' /proc/loadavg
    flatcap · 2014-04-18 19:12:05 10
  • weather 97405 Show Sample Output


    5
    weather() { curl -s "http://www.wunderground.com/q/zmw:$1.1.99999" | grep "og:title" | cut -d\" -f4 | sed 's/&deg;/ degrees F/'; }
    cadejscroggins · 2015-09-19 07:57:47 12
  • Very quick way to change a word in a file. I use it all the time to change variable names in my PHP scripts (sed -i 's/$oldvar/$newvar/g' index.php)


    4
    sed -i 's/OLD/NEW/g' FILE
    nanexcool · 2009-02-05 18:07:41 26
  • Very useful when the ssh key of a host has changed and ssh refuses to connect to the machine, while giving you the line number that has changed in ~/.ssh/known_hosts.


    4
    sed -i '10d' <somefile>
    raphink · 2009-02-16 15:05:29 127

  • 4
    sed '/./,$!d'
    grep · 2009-02-16 20:39:40 9
  • The ctrl+v,ctrl+m portion represents key presses that you should do. If you do it successfully you should see a ^M character appear.


    4
    sed 's/$/<ctrl+v><ctrl+m>/'
    SiegeX · 2009-02-16 20:53:05 12
  • ‹ First  < 4 5 6 7 8 >  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

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Decode base64-encoded file in one line of Perl
Another option is openssl.

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

Wait for file to stop changing
Here's a way to wait for a file (a download, a logfile, etc) to stop changing, then do something. As written it will just return to the prompt, but you could add a "; echo DONE" or whatever at the end. This just compares the full output of "ls" every 10 seconds, and keeps going as long as that output has changed since the last interval. If the file is being appended to, the size will change, and if it's being modified without growing, the timestamp from the "--full-time" option will have changed. The output of just "ls -l" isn't sufficient since by default it doesn't show seconds, just minutes. Waiting for a file to stop changing is not a very elegant or reliable way to measure that some process is finished - if you know the process ID there are much better ways. This method will also give a false positive if the changes to the target file are delayed longer than the sleep interval for any reason (network timeouts, etc). But sometimes the process that is writing the file doesn't exit, rather it continues on doing something else, so this approach can be useful if you understand its limitations.

Create a simple playlist sort by Genre using mp3info

Temporarily ignore known SSH hosts
you may create an alias also, which I did ;-) alias sshu="ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null "

dd with progress bar and statistics to gzipped image
This is a useful command to backup an sd card with relative total size for piping to pv with a progressbar

ThePirateBay.org torrent search
This one-liner greps first 30 direct URLs for .torrent files matching your search querry, ordered by number of seeds (descending; determined by the second number after your querry, in this case 7; for other options just check the site via your favorite web-browser). You don't have to care about grepping the torrent names as well, because they are already included in the .torrent URL (except for spaces and some other characters replaced by underscores, but still human-readable). Be sure to have some http://isup.me/ macro handy (someone often kicks the ethernet cables out of their servers ;) ). I've also coded a more user-friendly ash (should be BASH compatible) script, which also lists the total size of download and number of seeds/peers (available at http://saironiq.blogspot.com/2011/04/my-shell-scripts-4-thepiratebayorg.html - may need some tweaking, as it was written for a router running OpenWrt and transmission). Happy downloading!

print shared library dependencies
May be used on (embedded) systems lack ldd

Create new user with home dir and given password
The crypt function takes a password, key, as a string, and a salt character array which is described below, and returns a printable ASCII string which starts with another salt. It is believed that, given the output of the function, the best way to find a key that will produce that output is to guess values of key until the original value of key is found. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(Unix)


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: