Commands using sed (1,319)

  • alternative using 'host' Show Sample Output


    -1
    host -t a dartsclink.com | sed 's/.*has address //'
    dartsclink · 2009-08-14 16:11:18 13
  • Do this with caution.


    -1
    for kern in $(grep "initrd " /boot/grub/grub.conf|grep -v ^#|cut -f 2- -d-|sed -e 's/\.img//g'); do mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-$kern.img $kern; done
    oernii2 · 2009-08-19 09:53:29 502
  • Reverse DNS lookups, from a file with list of IP's, here the file is called lookups.txt


    -1
    sed 's/\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\).in-addr.arpa domain name pointer\(.*\)\./\4.\3.\2.\1\5/' \ lookups.txt
    hemanth · 2009-08-22 09:37:20 4

  • -1
    for dnsREC in $(curl -s http://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters |grep -Eo ^[A-Z\.]+\ |sed 's/TYPE//'); do echo -n "$dnsREC " && dig +short $dnsREC IANA.ORG; done
    commandlinefu · 2009-09-01 03:11:18 3
  • search argument in PATH accept grep expressions without args, list all binaries found in PATH Show Sample Output


    -1
    function sepath { echo $PATH |tr ":" "\n" |sort -u |while read L ; do cd "$L" 2>/dev/null && find . \( ! -name . -prune \) \( -type f -o -type l \) 2>/dev/null |sed "s@^\./@@" |egrep -i "${*}" |sed "s@^@$L/@" ; done ; }
    mobidyc · 2009-09-11 15:03:22 5
  • Uses curl to download page of membership of US Congress. Use sed to strip HTML then perl to print a line starting with two tabs (a line with a representative) Show Sample Output


    -1
    curl "http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.shtml" 2>/dev/null | sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/</N;//ba' | perl -nle 's/^\t\t(.*$)/ $1/ and print;'
    drewk · 2009-09-24 23:37:36 15
  • From Hong Kong Observatory wap site ;) Show Sample Output


    -1
    wget -q -O - 'http://wap.weather.gov.hk/' | sed -r 's/<[^>]+>//g;/^UV/q' | grep -v '^$'
    twfcc · 2009-09-25 02:21:05 6
  • "get Hong Kong weather infomation from HK Observatory From Hong Kong Observatory wap site ;)" other one showed alot of blank lines for me Show Sample Output


    -1
    wget -q -O - 'http://wap.weather.gov.hk/' | sed -r 's/<[^>]+>//g;/^UV/q' | tail -n4
    dakunesu · 2009-09-25 02:36:46 3
  • You'll run into trouble if you have files w/ missing newlines at the end. I tried to use PAGER='sed \$q' git blame and even PAGER='sed \$q' git -p blame to force a newline at the end, but as soon as the output is redirected, git seems to ignore the pager.


    -1
    git ls-files | while read i; do git blame $i | sed -e 's/^[^(]*(//' -e 's/^\([^[:digit:]]*\)[[:space:]]\+[[:digit:]].*/\1/'; done | sort | uniq -ic | sort -nr
    pipping · 2009-10-25 09:40:01 4

  • -1
    getdji (){local url sedcmd;url='http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=^DJI';sedcmd='/(DJI:.*)/,/Day.*/!d;s/^ *//g;';sedcmd="$sedcmd/Change:/s/Down / -/;/Change:/s/Up / +/;";sedcmd="$sedcmd/Open:/s//& /";lynx -dump "$url" | sed "$sedcmd"; }
    twfcc · 2009-10-26 09:00:18 5
  • Useful when you need to write e.g. an INSERT for a table with a large number of columns. This command will retrieve the column names and comma-separate them ready for INSERT INTO(...), removing the last comma.


    -1
    mysql -u <user> --password=<password> -e "SHOW COLUMNS FROM <table>" <database> | awk '{print $1}' | tr "\n" "," | sed 's/,$//g'
    maxmanders · 2009-10-29 13:42:17 3
  • This command uses the top voted "Get your external IP" command from commandlinefu.com to get your external IP address. Use this and you will always be using the communities favourite command. This is a tongue-in-cheek entry and not recommended for actual usage.


    -1
    eval $(curl -s http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/external/ZXh0ZXJuYWw=/sort-by-votes/plaintext|sed -n '/^# Get your external IP address$/{n;p;q}')
    jgc · 2009-11-04 16:58:31 6
  • same thing as the other


    -1
    ipcalc $(ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr:" | cut -d':' -f2,4 | sed 's/.+Bcast:/\//g') | awk '/Network/ { print $2 } '
    solarislackware · 2009-12-05 15:00:32 3

  • -1
    sed -e 's/{"url":/\n&/g' ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/sessionstore.js | cut -d\" -f4
    cfajohnson · 2009-12-10 04:31:31 4
  • There's too many options to number, My curiosity has forced me to make it using only sed. Maybe useful... or not... :-S


    -1
    sed '/./=' infile | sed '/^/N; s/\n/ /'
    glaudiston · 2009-12-10 16:24:56 6
  • Print out contents of file with line numbers. This version will print a number for every line, and separates the numbering from the line with a tab. Show Sample Output


    -1
    sed = <file> | sed 'N;s/\n/\t/'
    jgc · 2009-12-11 14:39:14 3
  • I needed to add a line to my crontab from within a script and didn't want to have to write my own temporary file. You may find you need to reload the crond after this to make the change take effect. e.g.: if [ -x /sbin/service ] then /sbin/service crond reload else CRON_PID=`ps -furoot | awk '/[^a-z]cron(d)?$/{print $2}'` if [ -n "$CRON_PID" ] then kill -HUP $CRON_PID fi fi The reason I had CRON_HOUR and CRON_MINS instead of numbers is that I wanted to generate a random time between midnight & 6AM to run the job, which I did with: CRON_HOUR=`/usr/bin/perl -e 'printf "%02d\n", int(rand(6))'` CRON_MINS=`/usr/bin/perl -e 'printf "%02d\n", int(rand(60));'`


    -1
    crontab -l | sed -e '$G;$s-$-'"$CRON_MINS $CRON_HOUR"' * * * /usr/bin/command >/dev/null 2>&1-' | crontab -
    JohnGH · 2010-01-07 11:00:05 6
  • Combines a few repetitive tasks when compiling source code. Especially useful when a hypen in a file-name breaks tab completion. 1.) wget source.tar.gz 2.) tar xzvf source.tar.gz 3.) cd source 4.) ls From there you can run ./configure, make and etc. Show Sample Output


    -1
    wtzc () { wget "$@"; foo=`echo "$@" | sed 's:.*/::'`; tar xzvf $foo; blah=`echo $foo | sed 's:,*/::'`; bar=`echo $blah | sed -e 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/' -e 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/'`; cd $bar; ls; }
    oshazard · 2010-01-17 11:25:47 3

  • -1
    watch -n 7 -d 'uptime | sed s/.*users?, //'
    matthewbauer · 2010-01-17 18:45:52 3

  • -1
    find . -maxdepth 1 -type f| xargs sha1sum | sed 's/^\(\w*\)\s*\(.*\)/\2 \1/' | while read LINE; do mv $LINE; done
    foremire · 2010-01-25 20:21:01 11
  • xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this: touch important_file touch 'not important_file' ls not* | xargs rm Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.


    -1
    ls -t1 | sed 1d | parallel -X rm
    unixmonkey8046 · 2010-01-28 12:28:18 3
  • Will return temperature in Fahrenheit of a location (New York City in example). Uses a Google API. Show Sample Output


    -1
    curl -s "http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=New%20York" | sed 's|.*<temp_f data="\([^"]*\)"/>.*|\1|'
    matthewbauer · 2010-02-08 23:06:48 5
  • Get Google Reader unread count from the command line. You'll have to define your auth token with $auth Or use: curl -s -H "Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=$(curl -sd "Email=$email&Passwd=$password&service=reader" https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin | grep Auth | sed 's/Auth=\(.*\)/\1/')" "http://www.google.com/reader/api/0/unread-count?output=json" | tr '{' '\n' | sed 's/.*"count":\([0-9]*\),".*/\1/' | grep -E ^[0-9]+$ | tr '\n' '+' | sed 's/\(.*\)+/\1\n/' | bc Show Sample Output


    -1
    curl -s -H "Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=$auth" "http://www.google.com/reader/api/0/unread-count?output=json" | tr '{' '\n' | sed 's/.*"count":\([0-9]*\),".*/\1/' | grep -E ^[0-9]+$ | tr '\n' '+' | sed 's/\(.*\)+/\1\n/' | bc
    matthewbauer · 2010-02-11 00:42:57 7

  • -1
    sed 's/pattern/^[[1m&^[[0m/g'
    rmcb · 2010-02-12 14:05:34 3
  • You WILL have problems if the files have the same name. Use cases: consolidate music library and unify photos (especially if your camera separates images by dates). After running the command and verifying if there was no name issues, you can use ls -d */ | sed -e 's/^/\"/g' -e 's/$/\"/g' | xargs rm -r to remove now empty subdirectories.


    -1
    ls -d */* | sed -e 's/^/\"/g' -e 's/$/\"/g' | xargs mv -t $(pwd)
    leovailati · 2010-03-01 23:43:26 6
  • ‹ First  < 42 43 44 45 46 >  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

Determining the excat memory usages by certain PID
this command gives you the total number of memory usuage and open files by the perticuler PID.

Revert back all files currently checked out by Perforce SCM for edit

Downsample mp3s to 128K
This will lower the quality of mp3 files, but is necessary to play them on some mobile devices.

run a command from within vi without exiting
":! ls -l " results in listing the files in the current directory. pressing "enter" will get you back into vi.

Calculates the date 2 weeks ago from Saturday the specified format.
Good for automating reports that need to run from between two dates.

Rescan partitions on a SCSI device
Used this after cloning a disk with dd to make the newly written partitions show up in /dev/

Edit a google doc with vim
Google just released a new commend line tool offering all sorts of new services from the commend line. One of them is uploading a youtube video but there are plenty more google services to interact with. Download it here: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/ Manual: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/wiki/Manual This specific command courtesy of lifehacker:http://lifehacker.com/5568817/ Though all can be found in manual page linked above.

run remote linux desktop
First of all you need to run this command. X :12.0 vt12 2>&1 >/dev/null & This command will open a X session on 12th console. And it will show you blank screen. Now press Alt + Ctrl + F7. You will get your original screen. Now run given command "xterm -display :12.0 -e ssh -X user@remotesystem &". After this press Alt + Ctrl + F12. You will get a screen which will ask you for password for remote linux system. And after it you are done. You can open any window based application of remote system on your desktop. Press Alt + Ctrl + F7 for getting original screen.

Check if the files in current directory has the RPATH variable defined
Using gentoo prefix portage I got in a situation where some packages did not contain the needed RPATH variable. This command helped me to find out which ones I should recompile

Colorize svn stat
Use color escape sequences and sed to colorize the output of svn stat -u. Colors: http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/colorizing.html svn stat characters: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn-book.html#svn.ref.svn.c.status GNU Extensions for Escapes in Regular Expressions: http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/Escapes.html


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: