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

get some information about the parent process from a given process

Set a Reminder for yourself via the notification system
This will be seen through your system's visual notification system, notify-osd, notification-daemon, etc. --- sleep accepts s,m,h,d and floats (date; sleep .25m; date) --- notify-send (-t is in milliseconds && -u low / normal / critical) man notify-send for more information --- notification-daemon can use b/i/u/a HTML

Recursively remove .svn directories

wrap long lines of a text
wraps text lines at the specified width (90 here). -s option is to force to wrap on blank characters -b count bytes instead of columns

Carriage return for reprinting on the same line
The above code is just an example of printing on the same line, hit Ctrl + C to stop When using echo -ne "something\r", echo will: - print "something" - dont print a new line (-n) - interpret \r as carriage return, going back to the start of the line (-e) Remember to print some white spaces after the output if your command will print lines of different sizes, mainly if one line will be smaller than the previous Edit from reading comments: You can achieve the same effect using printf (more standardized than echo): while true; do printf "%-80s\r" "$(date)"; sleep 1; done

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

shell function to make gnu info act like man.
I use this alias in my bashrc. The --vi-keys option makes info use vi-like and less-like key bindings.

Create an audio test CD of sine waves from 1 to 99 Hz
This command creates and burns a gapless audio CD with 99 tracks. Each track is a 30 second sine wave, the first is 1 Hz, the second 2 Hz, and so on, up to 99 Hz. This is useful for testing audio systems (how low can your bass go?) and for creating the constant vibrations needed to make non-Newtonian fluids (like cornstarch and water) crawl around. Note, this temporarily creates 500MB of .cdda files in the current directory. If you don't use the "rm" at the end of the command, you can burn more disks using $ cdrdao write cdrdao.toc Prerequisites: a blank CD-R in /dev/cdrw, sox (http://sox.sourceforge.net/), and cdrdao (http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/). I'm also assuming a recent version of bash for the brace expansion (which just looks nicer than using seq(1), but isn't necessary).

Copy a directory recursively without data/files

Show the power of the home row on the Dvorak Keyboard layout
Quick and dirty command that counts how many words can be typed just using the home row on the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout from a dictionary file, in this case /usr/share/dict/words. According to the regular expression supplied, each word must contain all the keys on the Dvorak home row, and no other characters. For comparison, I've shown how many words are installed in my dictionary, how many can be typed with just the Dvorak home row and how many can be typed with just the QWERTY home row in the sample output. Nearly 10 times the amount. If you want to see the words, remove the -c switch, and each word will be printed out.


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: