Commands using tar (226)

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

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

Display the output of a command from the first line until the first instance of a regular expression.
If BREs can be used, this sed version will also get the job done.

dd with progress bar and statistics to gzipped image

Find the dates your debian/ubuntu packages were installed.
Find when debian packages were installed on a system.

Function to check whether a regular file ends with a newline
tail -c 1 "$1" returns the last byte in the file. Command substitution deletes any trailing newlines, so if the file ended in a newline $(tail -c 1 "$1") is now empty, and the -z test succeeds. However, $a will also be empty for an empty file, so we add -s "$1" to check that the file has a size greater than zero. Finally, -f "$1" checks that the file is a regular file -- not a directory or a socket, etc.

Backup your hard drive with dd
This will create an exact duplicate image of your hard drive that you can then restore by simply reversing the "if" & "of" locations. $ sudo dd if=/media/disk/backup/sda.backup of=/dev/sda Alternatively, you can use an SSH connection to do your backups: $dd if=/dev/sda | ssh user@ssh.server.com dd of=~/backup/sda.backup

print contents of file from first match of regex to end of file
Search in "filename" for the first line to match regex, and print to stdout from the matching line to the end of the file.

Find broken symlinks and delete them
If you don't want to delete them, but just want to list them, do $ find -L /path -type l If you want to delete them with confirmation first, do $ find -L /path -type l -exec rm -i {} + Using the -L flag follows symlinks, so the -type l test only returns true if the link can't be followed, or is a symlink to another broken symlink.

List processes sorted by CPU usage

Show the UUID of a filesystem or partition
Shows the UUID of the given partition (here /dev/sda7). Doesn't need to be root.


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: