Commands using sort (800)

  • Sort and count subjects of emails stuck in Exim queue


    1
    grep -R Subject /var/spool/exim/input/ | sed s/^.*Subject:\ // | sort | uniq -c | sort -n > ~/email_sort.$(date +%m.%d.%y).txt
    unixmonkey27702 · 2011-11-24 14:13:29 3
  • Show total size of each subdirectory, broken down by KB,MB,GB,TB


    1
    du --max-depth=1 | sort -nr | awk ' BEGIN { split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ","); } { u = 1; while ($1 >= 1024) { $1 = $1 / 1024; u += 1 } $1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]); print $0; } '
    threv · 2011-12-08 17:43:09 4
  • One line Perl Script to determine the largest file sizes on a Linux Server

    This one line Perl script will display the smallest to the largest files sizes in all directories on a server. Show Sample Output


    1
    du -k | sort -n | perl -ne 'if ( /^(\d+)\s+(.*$)/){$l=log($1+.1);$m=int($l/log(1024)); printf ("%6.1f\t%s\t%25s %s\n",($1/(2**(10*$m))),(("K","M","G","T","P")[$m]),"*"x (1.5*$l),$2);}' | more
    Q_Element · 2012-02-07 15:49:19 10
  • Displays user-defined ps output and pidstat output about the top CPU or MEMory users.

    It grabs the PID's top resource users with $(ps -eo pid,pmem,pcpu| sort -k 3 -r|grep -v PID|head -10) The sort -k is sorting by the third field which would be CPU. Change this to 2 and it will sort accordingly. The rest of the command is just using diff to display the output of 2 commands side-by-side (-y flag) I chose some good ones for ps. pidstat comes with the sysstat package(sar, mpstat, iostat, pidstat) so if you don't have it, you should. I might should take off the timestamp... :| Show Sample Output


    1
    for i in $(ps -eo pid,pmem,pcpu| sort -k 3 -r|grep -v PID|head -10|awk '{print $1}');do diff -yw <(pidstat -p $i|grep -v Linux) <(ps -o euser,pri,psr,pmem,stat -p $i|tail);done
    bob_the_builder · 2012-02-16 20:54:32 23
  • Top 20 commands in your bash history


    1
    sed -e 's/[;|][[:space:]]*/\n/g' .bash_history | cut --delimiter=' ' --fields=1 | sort | uniq --count | sort --numeric-sort --reverse | head --lines=20
    WissenForscher · 2012-02-17 23:34:16 5
  • List files in directory tree with newest last


    1
    find <directory> -type f -printf "%T@\t%p\n"|sort -n|cut -f2|xargs ls -lrt
    rik · 2012-03-02 12:51:06 3
  • identify NEEDED sonames in a path

    This works in combination with http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/10496/identify-exported-sonames-in-a-path as it reports the NEEDED entries present in the files within a given path. You can then compare it with the libraries that are exported to make sure that, when cross-building a firmware image, you're not bringing in dependencies from the build host. The short version of it as can be seen in the same output is scanelf -RBnq -F "+n#f" $1 | tr ',' '\n' | sort -u Show Sample Output


    1
    scanelf --nobanner --recursive --quiet --needed --format "+n#F" $1 | tr ',' '\n' | sort -u
    Flameeyes · 2012-03-29 18:30:45 3
  • Recursively find top 20 largest files (> 1MB) sort human readable format

    from my bashrc ;)


    1
    find . -mount -type f -printf "%k %p\n" | sort -rg | cut -d \ -f 2- | xargs -I {} du -sh {} | less
    bashrc · 2012-03-30 07:37:52 3
  • List all files in current dir and subdirs sorted by size

    or tree -ifsF --noreport .|sort -n -k2|grep -v '/$' (rows presenting directory names become hidden)


    1
    tree -ifs --noreport .|sort -n -k2
    knoppix5 · 2012-05-04 09:18:39 6
  • Top 15 processes with the largest number of open files

    See the summary. Show Sample Output


    1
    lsof +c 15 | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
    SEJeff · 2012-05-25 16:31:46 3
  • du and sort to find the biggest directories in defined filesystem

    This command give a human readable result without messing up the sorting.


    1
    for i in G M K; do du -hx /var/ | grep [0-9]$i | sort -nr -k 1; done | less
    jlaunay · 2012-06-26 22:57:17 6
  • Read a tcpdump file and count SYN packets to port 80, Order column by destination.


    1
    tcpdump -ntr NAME_OF_CAPTURED_FILE.pcap 'tcp[13] = 0x02 and dst port 80' | awk '{print $4}' | tr . ' ' | awk '{print $1"."$2"."$3"."$4}' | sort | uniq -c | awk ' {print $2 "\t" $1 }'
    efuoax · 2012-08-22 21:26:10 7
  • Display IP : Count of failed login attempts

    The lastb command presents you with the history of failed login attempts (stored in /var/log/btmp). The reference file is read/write by root only by default. This can be quite an exhaustive list with lots of bots hammering away at your machine. Sometimes it is more important to see the scale of things, or in this case the volume of failed logins tied to each source IP. The awk statement determines if the 3rd element is an IP address, and if so increments the running count of failed login attempts associated with it. When done it prints the IP and count. The sort statement sorts numerically (-n) by column 3 (-k 3), so you can see the most aggressive sources of login attempts. Note that the ':' character is the 2nd column, and that the -n and -k can be combined to -nk. Please be aware that the btmp file will contain every instance of a failed login unless explicitly rolled over. It should be safe to delete/archive this file after you've processed it. Show Sample Output


    1
    sudo lastb | awk '{if ($3 ~ /([[:digit:]]{1,3}\.){3}[[:digit:]]{1,3}/)a[$3] = a[$3]+1} END {for (i in a){print i " : " a[i]}}' | sort -nk 3
    sgowie · 2012-09-11 14:51:10 4
  • Find the 10 users that take up the most disk space

    In OSX you would have to make sure that you "sudo -s" your way to happiness since it will give a few "Permission denied" errors before finally spitting out the results. In OSX the directory structure has to start with the "Users" Directory then it will recursively perform the operation. Your Lord and master, Mematron Show Sample Output


    1
    sudo -s du -sm /Users/* | sort -nr | head -n 10
    mematron · 2012-09-13 10:15:23 4
  • Get top N files in X directory

    You can simply run "largest", and list the top 10 files/directories in ./, or you can pass two parameters, the first being the directory, the 2nd being the limit of files to display. Best off putting this in your bashrc or bash_profile file Show Sample Output


    1
    largest() { dir=${1:-"./"}; count=${2:-"10"}; echo "Getting top $count largest files in $dir"; du -sx "$dir/"* | sort -nk 1 | tail -n $count | cut -f2 | xargs -I file du -shx file; }
    jhyland87 · 2013-01-21 09:45:21 7
  • Shows size of dirs and files, hidden or not, sorted.

    Enhanced version: fixes sorting by human readable numbers, and filters out non MB or GB entries that have a G or an M in their name.


    1
    du --max-depth=1 -h * |sort -h -k 1 |egrep '(M|G)\s'
    TerDale · 2013-02-14 08:56:56 6
  • (DEBIAN-BASED DISTROS) Find total installed size of packages given a search term

    Replace \-dev with whatever you wanna search for


    1
    dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | grep "\-dev" | sort -n | awk '{ sum+=$1} END {print sum/1024 "MB"}'
    threv · 2013-02-15 20:29:18 4
  • Display 16 largest installed RPMs in size order, largest first

    Interesting to see which packages are larger than the kernel package. Useful to understand which RPMs might be candidates to remove if drive space is restricted. Show Sample Output


    1
    rpm -qa --queryformat '%{size} %{name}-%{version}-%{release}\n' | sort -k 1,1 -rn | nl | head -16
    mpb · 2013-03-19 21:10:54 6
  • Display unique values of a column

    the column number is '6'


    1
    cut -d',' -f6 file.csv | sort | uniq
    richie · 2013-04-10 14:05:32 6
  • Prints total line count contribution per user for an SVN repository

    make usable on OSX with filenames containing spaces. note: will still break if filenames contain newlines... possible, but who does that?!


    1
    svn ls -R | egrep -v -e "\/$" | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 svn blame | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
    rymo · 2013-04-10 19:37:53 5
  • Mapreduce style processing

    parallel can be installed on your central node and can be used to run a command multiple times. In this example, multiple ssh connections are used to run commands. (-j is the number of jobs to run at the same time). The result can then be piped to commands to perform the "reduce" stage. (sort then uniq in this example). This example assumes "keyless ssh login" has been set up between the central node and all machines in the cluster. bashreduce may also do what you want. Show Sample Output


    1
    parallel -j 50 ssh {} "ls" ::: host1 host2 hostn | sort | uniq -c
    macoda · 2013-04-12 11:56:41 7
  • most used unix commands


    1
    awk '{print $1}' ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10
    nesses · 2013-05-03 16:24:30 6
  • directory size with subdirectories, sorted list


    1
    du -m --max-depth=1 [DIR] | sort -nr
    Paulus · 2013-07-26 07:04:41 12
  • List your largest installed packages (on Debian/Ubuntu)

    The other commands were good, but they included packages that were installed and then removed. This command only shows packages that are currently installed, sorts smallest to largest, and formats the sizes to be human readable. Show Sample Output


    1
    dpkg-query --show --showformat='${Package;-50}\t${Installed-Size}\n' `aptitude --display-format '%p' search '?installed!?automatic'` | sort -k 2 -n | grep -v deinstall | awk '{printf "%.3f MB \t %s\n", $2/(1024), $1}'
    EvilDennisR · 2013-07-26 23:18:20 13
  • Diff two directories by finding and comparing the md5 checksums of their contents.

    Compute the md5 checksums for the contents of two mirrored directories, then sort and diff the results. If everything matches, nothing is returned. Otherwise, any checksums which do not match, or which exist in one tree but not the other, are returned. As you might imagine, the output is useful only if no errors are found, because only the checksums, not filenames, are returned. I hope to address this, or that someone else will!


    1
    diff <(sort <(md5deep -r /directory/1/) |cut -f1 -d' ') <(sort <(md5deep -r /directory/2/) |cut -f1 -d' ')
    unixmonkey64021 · 2013-08-18 22:13:07 6
  • ‹ First  < 12 13 14 15 16 >  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

list files recursively by size

Unite pdf files
pdfunite is a part of the poppler-utils. poppler-utils package is only 150KB. The alternative - pdftk package is 14MB! Install poppler-utils if you need simple pdf operation commands like unite, separate, info, text/html conversions

To get you started!
Do it.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Clear filesystem memory cache
Found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=589975

Set OS X X11 to use installed Mathematica fonts

grab all commandlinefu shell functions into a single file, suitable for sourcing.
Each shell function has its own summary line, as a comment. If there are multiple shell functions with the same name, the function with the highest number of votes is put into the file. Note: added 'grep -v' to the end of the pipeline, to eliminate extraneous lines containing only '--'. Thanks to matthewbauer for pointing this out.

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.

Lists the size of certain file in every 10 seconds
watch is a command especially designed for doing this job

back ssh from firewalled hosts
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh. host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd). once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B. host B just do a ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user and reaches the remote host'ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.

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: