Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands using sed from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using sed - 1,055 results
equery s | sed 's/(\|)/ /g' | sort -n -k 9 | gawk '{print $1" "$9/1048576"m"}'
2009-07-30 01:12:10
User: Alanceil
Functions: gawk sed sort
Tags: size Gentoo packets
0
Up
Down
Gentoo: Get the size of all installed packets, sorted

On a Gentoo system, this command will tell you which packets you have installed and sort them by how much space they consume. Good for finding out space-hogs when tidying up disk space.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -pt1 | sed '/.*\//d' | sed 1d | xargs rm
2009-07-29 13:59:58
User: patko
Functions: ls sed xargs
6
Up
Down
Delete all but latest file in a directory

Useful for deleting old unused log files.

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ipconfig getpacket en0 | grep yi| sed s."yiaddr = "."en0: ". ipconfig getpacket en1 | grep yi| sed s."yiaddr = "."en1: ".
2009-07-29 12:10:32
User: swormley
Functions: grep sed
Tags: Linux perl ifconfig
0
Up
Down
Get all IPs via ifconfig
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
DD=`cat /etc/my.cnf | sed "s/#.*//g;" | grep datadir | tr '=' ' ' | gawk '{print $2;}'` && ( cd $DD ; find . -mindepth 2 | grep -v db\.opt | sed 's/\.\///g; s/\....$//g; s/\//./;' | sort | uniq | tr '/' '.' | gawk '{print "CHECK TABLE","`"$1"`",";";}' )
2009-07-25 03:42:31
User: atcroft
Functions: cd find gawk grep sed sort tr uniq
-1
Up
Down
Generate CHECK TABLE statements for all MySQL database tables on a server

This command will generate "CHECK TABLE `db_name.table_name` ;" statements for all tables present in databases on a MySQL server, which can be piped into the mysql command. (Can also be altered to perform OPTIMIZE and REPAIR functions.)

Tested on MySQL 4.x and 5.x systems in a Linux environment under bash.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed 's/,/\t/g' report.csv > report.tsv
2009-07-23 15:39:03
User: viner
Functions: sed
0
Up
Down
Convert CSV files to TSV

Convert comma separated files to tab separated files.

(MySQL eats tab separated files with much less instruction than comma seperated files.)

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed -n 's/.*<foo>\([^<]*\)<\/foo>.*/\1/p'
2009-07-23 07:59:30
User: recursiverse
Functions: sed
Tags: Shell programming sed xml
4
Up
Down
Simple XML tag extract with sed

Limited, but useful construct to extract text embedded in XML tags. This will only work if bar is all on one line.

If nobody posts an alternative for the multiline sed version, I'll figure it out later...

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
lynx -dump http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/?QRY=$1|sed -nr s/'^.*My IP address city: (.+)$/\1/p'
2009-07-22 16:14:56
User: antcore
Functions: sed
Tags: bash geographical location
1
Up
Down
find geographical location of an ip address

a shorter version

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
curl -u 'username' https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all | sed 's/^.*href=//g;s/>.*$//g;s/"//g' | awk '{print $1}' | grep 'http'
2009-07-22 07:32:59
User: bubo
Functions: awk grep sed
2
Up
Down
get delicious bookmarks on your shell (text version :-))

a variation of avi4now's command - thanks by the way!

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr" | sed -e 's/.*inet addr:\(.*\) B.*/\1/g'
2009-07-21 14:10:39
User: digitalmechanic
Functions: grep sed
Tags: IP
-2
Up
Down
Read just the IP address of a device
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed -n '/<Tag>/,/<\/Tag>/p' logfile.log
2009-07-20 13:24:56
User: sanmiguel
Functions: sed
0
Up
Down
Extract XML from an otherwise plain text log file

If your XML is appended to a line with a time stamp or other leading text irrelevant to the XML, then you can append a s/foo/bar/ command, like this:

sed -n /<Tag>/,/<\/Tag>/p; s/.*\(<Tag.*\)/\1/' logfile.log
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in *.xml; do sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' "$i"; done
2009-07-20 08:55:18
User: irraz
Functions: sed
-2
Up
Down
Change password in list of xml files with for and sed
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -name '*.html' -print0| xargs -0 -L1 cat |sed "s/[\"\<\>' \t\(\);]/\n/g" |grep "http://" |sort -u
2009-07-14 07:00:15
User: jamespitt
Functions: cat find grep sed sort xargs
4
Up
Down
find external links in all html files in a directory list

Just a handy way to get all the unique links from inside all the html files inside a directory. Can be handy on scripts etc.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
infile=$1 for i in $(cat $infile) do echo $i | tr "," "\n" | sort -n | tr "\n" "," | sed "s/,$//" echo done
2009-07-12 21:23:37
User: iframe
Functions: cat echo sed sort tr
Tags: cat bash sort sed tr
0
Up
Down
Sorting by rows

Save the script as: sort_file

Usage: sort_file < sort_me.csv > out_file.csv

This script was originally posted by Admiral Beotch in LinuxQuestions.org on the Linux-Software forum.

I modified this script to make it more portable.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed -r 's/[ \t\r\n\v\f]+/\^J/g' INFILE > OUTFILE
2009-07-08 19:59:33
User: qazwart
Functions: sed
0
Up
Down
Puts every word from a file into a new line

What happens if there is more than a single space between words, or spaces and tabs? This command will remove duplicate spaces and tabs.

The "-r" switch allows for extended regular expressions. No additional piping necessary.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
system_profiler SPPowerDataType | egrep -e "Connected|Charge remaining|Full charge capacity|Condition" | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//'
2009-07-01 15:09:08
User: bpfx
Functions: egrep sed
1
Up
Down
Show battery infomations for OS X 10.5.x
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn log | tr -d '\n' | sed -r 's/-{2,}/\n/g' | sed -r 's/ \([^\)]+\)//g' | sed -r 's/^r//' | sed -r "s/[0-9]+ lines?//g" | sort -g
2009-06-29 12:48:30
User: Cowboy
Functions: sed sort tr
3
Up
Down
SVN Status log to CSV

Note you have also the --xml option ;)

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo $numbers | sed "s/\( \|$\)/\n/g" | sort -nu | tr "\n" " " | sed -e "s/^ *//" -e "s/ $//"
2009-06-24 15:12:17
User: chickenzilla
Functions: echo sed sort tr
-1
Up
Down
Sort a list of numbers on on line, separated by spaces.

You can replace "sort -nu" with "sort -u" for a word list sorted or "sort -R" for a random-sorted line

(edit: corrected)

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo sed 's/\o0/\n/g' "/proc/$(pidof -x firefox)/environ" ;# replace firefox
2009-06-21 09:47:02
User: plasticdoc
Functions: sed sudo
3
Up
Down
Show an application's environment variables
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn status | grep '!' | sed 's/!/ /' | xargs svn del --force
2009-06-20 13:01:07
User: tarzantiger
Functions: grep sed xargs
2
Up
Down
Deleting Files from svn which are missing
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed -n '/START/,${/STOP/q;p}'
2009-06-19 15:27:36
User: mungewell
Functions: sed
Tags: sed grep
3
Up
Down
Efficiently extract lines between markers

GNU Sed can 'address' between two regex, but it continues parsing through to the end of the file. This slight alteration causes it to terminate reading the input file once the STOP match is made.

In my example I have included an extra '/START/d' as my 'start' marker line contains the 'stop' string (I'm extracting data between 'resets' and using the time stamp as the 'start').

My previous coding using grep is slightly faster near the end of the file, but overall (extracting all the reset cycles in turn) the new SED method is quicker and a lot neater.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d'
2009-06-19 10:23:38
User: plasticdoc
Functions: sed
Tags: Linux sed dpkg
4
Up
Down
show installed but unused linux headers, image, or modules

will show:

installed linux headers, image, or modules: /^ii/!d

avoiding current kernel: /'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d

only application names: s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/

avoiding stuff without a version number: /[0-9]/!d

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge
2009-06-19 10:11:00
User: plasticdoc
Functions: sed sudo xargs
Tags: Linux sed apt-get xargs dpkg purge
6
Up
Down
purge installed but unused linux headers, image, or modules

will purge:

only installed apps: /^ii/!d

avoiding current kernel stuff: /'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d

using app names: s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/

avoiding stuff without a version number: /[0-9]/!d

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed -e "s/\[{/\n/g" -e "s/}, {/\n/g" sessionstore.js | grep url | awk -F"," '{ print $1 }'| sed -e "s/url:\"\([^\"]*\)\"/\1/g" -e "/^about:blank/d" > session_urls.txt
2009-06-14 15:08:31
User: birnam
Functions: awk grep sed
2
Up
Down
extract all urls from firefox sessionstore

This will extract all of the urls from a firefox session (including urls in a tab's history). The sessionstore.js file is in ~/.mozilla/firefox/{firefox profile}

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
egrep -r '(render_message|multipart).*('`find app/views -name '*.erb' | grep mailer | sed -e 's/\..*//' -e 's/.*\///' | uniq | xargs | sed 's/ /|/g'`')' app/models
2009-06-12 18:53:29
User: foobarfighter
Functions: egrep grep sed uniq xargs
0
Up
Down
Finds all of the mailers being used in your rails app
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed '/MARKER/{N;s/THIS/THAT/}'
2009-06-12 02:29:50
User: mungewell
Functions: sed
Tags: sed gnuplot
5
Up
Down
Apply substitution only on the line following a marker

I've been auto-generating some complex GnuPlots; with multiplots the first plot of each group needs to be a 'plot' whereas the others need to be 'replots' to allow overplotting/autoscaling/etc to work properly.

This is used to replace only the first instance of 'replot'.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate