Commands using sort (800)

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

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

set a reminder for 5 days in the future
setup for reminder in 5 days, added the date in the future. To run a job at 4pm three days from now, you would do at 4pm + 3 days, to run a job at 10:00am on July 31, you would do at 10am Jul 31 and to run a job at 1am tomorrow, you would do at 1am tomorrow.

Add directory to $PATH if it's not already there
Sometimes in a script you want to make sure that a directory is in the path, and add it in if it's not already there. In this example, $dir contains the new directory you want to add to the path if it's not already present. There are multiple ways to do this, but this one is a nice clean shell-internal approach. I based it on http://stackoverflow.com/a/1397020. You can also do it using tr to separate the path into lines and grep -x to look for exact matches, like this: $ if ! $(echo "$PATH" | tr ":" "\n" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://stackoverflow.com/a/5048977. Or replace the "echo | tr" part with a shell parameter expansion, like $ if ! $(echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'}" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3209/. There are also other more regex-y ways to do it, but I find the ones listed here easiest to follow. Note some of this is specific to the bash shell.

Toggle between directories
switch to previous directory or toggle

Extract the contents of an RPM package to your current directory without installing them.
This assumes you have the 'rpm', 'rpm2cpio' and 'cpio' packages installed. This will extract the contents of the RPM package to your current directory. This is useful for working with the files that the package provides without installing the package on your system. Might be useful to create a temporary directory to hold the packages before running the extraction: $ mkdir /tmp/new-package/; cd /tmp/new-package

Push your present working directory to a stack that you can pop later
If are a Bash user and you are in a directory and need to go else where for a while but don't want to lose where you were, use pushd instead of cd. cd /home/complicated/path/.I/dont/want/to/forget pushd /tmp cd thing/in/tmp popd (returns you to /home/complicated/path/.I/dont/want/to/forget)

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

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Show complete URL in netstat output
This takes all of the tab spaces, and uses column to put them into the appropriately sized table.

Add temporary entry to authorized_keys
If you frequently need to connect to your ubersecure mainframe from various uberunsafe machines, you have to face difficult decision: (a) type the password everytime during the session (lame), (b) add local public key to mainframes authorized_keys file (unsafe), (c) as above, but remove this key at the end of the session (pain in the a55). So let's say you save The Command to tempauth file in bin directory of your mainframe's account and make it executable. Then, while you're on one of these unsafe ones, do: $ cat $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub|ssh 5z474n@mainframe.nl bin/tempauth 30 and password prompts stop the harassment for 30 minutes and you don't have to care to remove the unsafe key after that.


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: