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

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May 19, 2015 - A Look At The New Commandlinefu
I've put together a short writeup on what kind of newness you can expect from the next iteration of clfu. Check it out here.
March 2, 2015 - New Management
I'm Jon, I'll be maintaining and improving clfu. Thanks to David for building such a great resource!
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awk, bash, curl, find, grep, Linux, sed
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Credits

Maintained by Jon H.

Site originally by David Winterbottom (user root).

Psst. Open beta.

Wow, didn't really expect you to read this far down. The latest iteration of the site is in open beta. It's a gentle open beta-- not in prime-time just yet. It's being hosted over at UpGuard (link) and you are more than welcome to give it a shot. Couple things:

  • » The open beta is running a copy of the database that will not carry over to the final version. Don't post anything you don't mind losing.
  • » If you wish to use your user account, you will probably need to reset your password.
Your feedback is appreciated via the form on the beta page. Thanks! -Jon & CLFU Team

Commands using sort from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using sort - 668 results
tail -n2000 /var/www/domains/*/*/logs/access_log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | awk '{ if ($1 > 20)print $1,$2}'
2010-05-10 19:08:37
User: allrightname
Functions: awk sort tail uniq
Tags: bash sort awk uniq tail IP apache
4
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Count number of hits per IP address in last 2000 lines of apache logs and print the IP and hits if hits > 20
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
netstat -an | awk '/tcp/ {print $6}' | sort | uniq -c
2010-05-06 17:04:37
User: Kered557
Functions: awk netstat sort uniq
Tags: sort awk uniq netstat
1
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Count TCP States From Netstat

Counts TCP states from Netstat and displays in an ordered list.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . \( -iname '*.[ch]' -o -iname '*.php' -o -iname '*.pl' \) -exec wc -l {} + | sort -n
2010-05-03 00:16:02
User: hackerb9
Functions: find sort wc
Tags: find wc count GNU find
5
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Count lines of code across multiple file types, sorted by least amount of code to greatest

The same as the other two alternatives, but now less forking! Instead of using '\;' to mark the end of an -exec command in GNU find, you can simply use '+' and it'll run the command only once with all the files as arguments.

This has two benefits over the xargs version: it's easier to read and spaces in the filesnames work automatically (no -print0). [Oh, and there's one less fork, if you care about such things. But, then again, one is equal to zero for sufficiently large values of zero.]

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history | awk '{a[$'$(echo "1 2 $HISTTIMEFORMAT" | wc -w)']++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
2010-05-02 21:48:53
User: bandie91
Functions: awk echo sort wc
Tags: history awk wc
0
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List of commands you use most often

If you use HISTTIMEFORMAT environment e.g. timestamping typed commands, $(echo "1 2 $HISTTIMEFORMAT" | wc -w)

gives the number of columns that containing non-command parts per lines.

It should universify this command.

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find . \( -iname '*.[ch]' -o -iname '*.php' -o -iname '*.pl' \) | xargs wc -l | sort -n
2010-04-30 12:21:28
User: rbossy
Functions: find sort wc xargs
Tags: find count
0
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Count lines of code across multiple file types, sorted by least amount of code to greatest

find -exec is evil since it launches a process for each file. You get the total as a bonus.

Also, without -n sort will sort by lexical order (that is 9 after 10).

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ps hax -o user | sort | uniq -c
2010-04-29 10:43:03
User: buzzy
Functions: ps sort uniq
Tags: sort uniq ps processes
21
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processes per user counter

awk is evil!

Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
zenity --list --width 500 --height 500 --column 'radio' --column 'url' --print-column 2 $(curl -s http://www.di.fm/ | awk -F '"' '/href="http:.*\.pls.*96k/ {print $2}' | sort | awk -F '/|\.' '{print $(NF-1) " " $0}') | xargs mplayer
2010-04-28 23:45:35
User: polaco
Functions: awk sort xargs
Tags: mplayer music radio zenity menu
15
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Choose from a nice graphical menu which DI.FM radio station to play

This is a very simple and lightweight way to play DI.FM stations

For a more complete version of the command with proper strings in the menu, try: (couldnt fit in the command field above)

zenity --list --width 500 --height 500 --title 'DI.FM' --text 'Pick a Radio' --column 'radio' --column 'url' --print-column 2 $(curl -s http://www.di.fm/ | awk -F '"' '/href="http:.*\.pls.*96k/ {print $2}' | sort | awk -F '/|\.' '{print $(NF-1) " " $0}') | xargs mplayer

This command line parses the html returned from http://di.fm and display all radio stations in a nice graphical menu. After the radio is chosen, the url is passed to mplayer so the music can start

dependencies:

- x11 with gtk environment

- zenity: simple app for displaying gtk menus (sudo apt-get install zenity on ubuntu)

- mplayer: simple audio player (sudo apt-get install mplayer on ubuntu)

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find -name `egrep -s '.' * | awk -F":" '{print $1}' | sort -u` -exec stat {} \;
2010-04-26 20:01:44
User: unixmonkey8594
Functions: awk find sort stat
1
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Stat each file in a directory

This will run stat on each file in the directory.

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find ./ -name *.h -exec egrep -cH "// | /\*" {} \; | awk -F':' '{print $2 ":" $1}' | sort -gr
2010-04-23 19:00:07
User: blocky
Functions: awk egrep find sort
1
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Iterate through current directory + all subs for C++ header files and rank by # of comments

This shows you which files are most in need of commenting (one line of output per file)

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rpm -q -a --qf '%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n' | sort -k1,1n
2010-04-19 07:44:49
User: octopus
Functions: rpm sort
Tags: rpm Linux UNIX package
3
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List all packages by installed size (Bytes) on rpm distros
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printf "\n%25s%10sTOTAL\n" 'FILE TYPE' ' '; for ext in $(find . -iname \*.* | egrep -o '\.[^[:space:].]+$' | egrep -v '\.svn*' | sort -f | uniq -i); do count=$(find . -iname \*$ext | wc -l); printf "%25s%10s%d\n" $ext ' ' $count; done
2010-04-16 21:12:11
User: rkulla
Functions: egrep find printf sort uniq wc
Tags: egrep find count printf report extensions
0
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Get a count of how many file types a project has

I created this command to give me a quick overview of how many file types a directory, and all its subdirectories, contains. It works based off file extension, rather than file(1)'s magic output, because it ended up being more accurate and less confusing.

Files that don't have an ext (README) are generally not important for me to want to count, but you're free to customize this fit your needs.

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grep ^lease /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd.leases | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | sort -t . -k 1,1n -k 2,2n -k 3,3n -k 4,4n | uniq
2010-04-16 09:52:32
User: niallh
Functions: cut grep sort
0
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sorted list of dhcp allocations
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for i in emerg alert crit error warn ; do awk '$6 ~ /^\['$i'/ {print substr($0, index($0,$6)) }' error_log | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -1; done
2010-04-15 21:47:18
User: zlemini
Functions: awk sort tail uniq
4
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Quickly analyse an Apache error log

This searches the Apache error_log for each of the 5 most significant Apache error levels, if any are found the date is then cut from the output in order to sort then print the most common occurrence of each error.

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rpm -qa --qf "%-30{NAME} %-10{SIZE}\n" | sort -n | less
2010-04-14 07:30:37
User: betsubetsu
Functions: rpm sort
2
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Sort installed rpms in alphabetic order with their size.
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rpm -qa --qf "%-10{SIZE} %-30{NAME}\n" | sort -nr | less
2010-04-14 07:28:41
User: betsubetsu
Functions: rpm sort
2
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Sort installed rpms by decreasing size.

It's all said in the title.

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sudo awk '($9 ~ /404/)' /var/log/httpd/www.domain-access_log | awk '{print $2,$9,$7,$11}' | sort | uniq -c
2010-04-09 10:31:50
User: ninjasys
Functions: awk sort sudo uniq
Tags: log error apache
1
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Display error pages in report format

This command will return a full list of Error 404 pages in the given access log. The following variables have been given to awk

Hostname ($2), ERROR Code ($9), Missing Item ($7), Referrer ($11)

You can then send this into a file (>> /path/to/file), which you can open with OpenOffice as a CSV

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awk '$9 == 404 {print $7}' access_log | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
2010-04-08 21:40:53
User: zlemini
Functions: awk sort uniq
8
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Find pages returning 404 errors in apache logs

Finds the top ten pages returning an http response code of 404 in an apache log.

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cat /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/* | egrep 'ServerAlias|ServerName' | tr -s ' ' | sed 's/^\s//' | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | sed 's/www.//' | sort | uniq
2010-04-08 15:50:34
User: chronosMark
Functions: cat cut egrep sed sort tr
2
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Get Unique Hostnames from Apache Config Files

Get a list of all the unique hostnames from the apache configuration files. Handy to see what sites are running on a server. A slightly shorter version.

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history | perl -F"\||<\(|;|\`|\\$\(" -alne 'foreach (@F) { print $1 if /\b((?!do)[a-z]+)\b/i }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head
2010-04-08 13:46:09
User: alperyilmaz
Functions: perl sort uniq
Tags: history count most-used
4
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most used commands in history (comprehensive)

Most of the "most used commands" approaches does not consider pipes and other complexities.

This approach considers pipes, process substitution by backticks or $() and multiple commands separated by ;

Perl regular expression breaks up each line using | or < ( or ; or ` or $( and picks the first word (excluding "do" in case of for loops)

note: if you are using lots of perl one-liners, the perl commands will be counted as well in this approach, since semicolon is used as a separator

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cat /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/* | egrep 'ServerAlias|ServerName' | tr -s " " | sed 's/^[ ]//g' | uniq | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | sed 's/www.//g' | sort | uniq
2010-04-08 08:51:17
User: chronosMark
Functions: cat cut egrep sed sort tr uniq
0
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Get Unique Hostnames from Apache Config Files

Get a list of all the unique hostnames from the apache configuration files. Handy to see what sites are running on a server.

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find ./ -iname "*.djvu" -execdir perl -e [email protected]=`djvutxt \"$ARGV[0]\"\|grep -c Berlekamp`; chomp @s; print $s[0]; print " $ARGV[0]\n"' '{}' \;|sort -n
2010-04-07 11:15:26
User: unixmonkey4437
Functions: find grep perl sort
0
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Grep through the text of djvu files and format results

Count the occurences of the word 'Berlekamp' in the DJVU files that are in the current directory, printing file names from the one having the least to the most occurences.

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cut -d\ -f 1 ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10 | sed 's/.*/ &/g'
2010-04-06 22:48:26
User: er0k
Functions: cut head sed sort uniq
1
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most used unix commands
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du -cks * | sort -rn | while read size fname; do for unit in k M G T P E Z Y; do if [ $size -lt 1024 ]; then echo -e "${size}${unit}\t${fname}"; break; fi; size=$((size/1024)); done; done
2010-04-05 17:09:14
User: askedrelic
Functions: du echo read size sort
Tags: bash disk usage sort du grep
8
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easily find megabyte eating files or directories
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du -kd | egrep -v "/.*/" | sort -n
2010-03-30 15:40:35
User: rmbjr60
Functions: du egrep sort
Tags: bash disk usage sort du grep
-1
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easily find megabyte eating files or directories

Thanks for the submit! My alternative produces summaries only for directories. The original post additionally lists all files in the current directory. Sometimes the files, they just clutter up the output. Once the big directory is located, *then* worry about which file(s) are consuming so much space.

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TR=`free|grep Mem:|awk '{print $2}'`;ps axo rss,comm,pid|awk -v tr=$TR '{proc_list[$2]+=$1;} END {for (proc in proc_list) {proc_pct=(proc_list[proc]/tr)*100; printf("%d\t%-16s\t%0.2f%\n",proc_list[proc],proc,proc_pct);}}'|sort -n |tail -n 10
2010-03-27 01:34:50
User: d34dh0r53
Functions: awk grep sort tail
3
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Updated top ten memory utilizing processes (child/instance aggregation) now with percentages of total RAM

Prints the top 10 memory consuming processes (with children and instances aggregated) sorted by total RSS and calculates the percentage of total RAM each uses. Please note that since RSS can include shared libraries it is possible for the percentages to add up to more that the total amount of RAM, but this still gives you a pretty good idea. Also note that this does not work with the mawk version of awk, but it works fine with GNU Awk which is on most Linux systems. It also does not work on OS X.

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