Hide

What's this?

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

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

World cup college
Hide

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:

Hide

News

2010-03-03 - Commandlinefu @ SXSW 2010
Am going to be at SXSW this year, in case you want to submit any CLI nuggets or suggestions to me in person. Ping me on the @codeinthehole Twitter account.
2009-09-12 - Email updates now available
You can now enable email updates to let you know each time you're command is commented on.
2009-07-11 - API and javascript blog widget now available
A simple API has been released, allowing commands to be retrieved in various formats. This also allows commands to be embedded on blogs/homepages.
2009-05-17 - Added duplicate suggestions to the new command form
When adding a new command, a quick background search is performed to make sure you're not duplicating a command already in the system.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Display a block of text with AWK

Terminal - Display a block of text with AWK
awk '/start_pattern/,/stop_pattern/' file.txt
2009-03-28 14:28:59
User: atoponce
Functions: awk
41
Up
Down
Display a block of text with AWK

I find this terribly useful for grepping through a file, looking for just a block of text. There's "grep -A # pattern file.txt" to see a specific number of lines following your pattern, but what if you want to see the whole block? Say, the output of "dmidecode" (as root):

dmidecode | awk '/Battery/,/^$/'

Will show me everything following the battery block up to the next block of text. Again, I find this extremely useful when I want to see whole blocks of text based on a pattern, and I don't care to see the rest of the data in output. This could be used against the '/etc/securetty/user' file on Unix to find the block of a specific user. It could be used against VirtualHosts or Directories on Apache to find specific definitions. The scenarios go on for any text formatted in a block fashion. Very handy.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
sed -n /start_pattern/,/stop_pattern/p file.txt
2009-10-24 16:35:39
User: pipping
Functions: sed
3
Up
Down
Display a block of text with AWK
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
vim -e -s -c 'g/start_pattern/+1,/stop_pattern/-1 p' -cq file.txt
2009-08-26 10:22:27
User: syladmin
Functions: vim
Tags: vim block
1
Up
Down
Display a block of text with vim with offset, like with AWK

By using vim, you can also filter content on stdout, using vim's extra power, like search pattern offset!

No more awk of course, sorry.

details :

-e ex mode

-s silent

-c 'ex command' : global + start and end pattern + offset print (p)

-cq : quit

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

Very nice.

dmidecode | awk '/Core/,/^$/'
Comment by Williebee 49 weeks and 6 days ago

Awesome! Awk is such a powerful tool and I always wish I knew it better.

Comment by philiph 49 weeks and 5 days ago

Thanks a lot

Comment by megerdin 49 weeks and 5 days ago

Nice! I like using this for xml files.

Comment by tajohnson 44 weeks ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts