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.

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

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

View the newest xkcd comic.

Terminal - View the newest xkcd comic.
xkcd(){ wget -qO- http://xkcd.com/|tee >(feh $(grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs[^/]+/comics/[^"]+\.\w{3}'))|grep -Po '(?<=(\w{3})" title=").*(?=" alt)';}
2009-11-27 09:11:47
User: eightmillion
Functions: grep tee wget
21
Up
Down
View the newest xkcd comic.

This function displays the latest comic from xkcd.com. One of the best things about xkcd is the title text when you hover over the comic, so this function also displays that after you close the comic.

To get a random xkcd comic, I also use the following:

xkcdrandom(){ wget -qO- dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random|tee >(feh $(grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs[^/]+/comics/[^"]+\.\w{3}'))|grep -Po '(?<=(\w{3})" title=").*(?=" alt)';}
Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 10 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
eog `curl -s http://xkcd.com/ | sed -n 's/<h3>Image URL.*: \(.*\)<\/h3>/\1/p'`
2010-08-31 13:23:21
User: bluesman
Functions: sed
Tags: bash curl function xkcd comic webcomic
5
Up
Down
View the newest xkcd comic.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
wget `lynx --dump http://xkcd.com/|grep png`
2009-12-03 23:10:22
User: metalx1000
Functions: grep wget
Tags: bash wget lynx curl function xkcd comic webcomic
1
Up
Down
View the newest xkcd comic.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
curl -s 'xkcd.com' | awk -F\" '/^<img/{printf("<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>\n<xkcd>\n<item>\n <title>%s</title>\n <comment>%s</comment>\n <image>%s</image>\n</item>\n</xkcd>\n", $6, $4, $2)}'
2009-12-03 19:49:37
User: putnamhill
Functions: awk
Tags: awk curl xkcd comic webcomic
0
Up
Down
View the newest xkcd comic.

I wasn't sure how to display the image, so I thought I'd try xml for a different twist.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
xkcd() { wget -qO- http://xkcd.com/ | sed -n 's#^<img src="\(http://imgs.[^"]\+\)"\s\+title="\(.\+\?\)"\salt.\+$#eog "\1"\necho '"'\2'#p" | bash ; }
2010-08-25 15:44:31
User: John_W
Functions: bash sed wget
Tags: bash curl function xkcd comic webcomic
0
Up
Down
View the newest xkcd comic.

This function displays the latest comic from xkcd.com. One of the best things about xkcd is the title text when you hover over the comic, so this function also displays that after you close the comic.

To get a random xkcd comic use the following:

xkcdrandom() { wget -qO- http://dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random | sed -n 's#^<img src="\(http://imgs.[^"]\+\)"\s\+title="\(.\+\?\)"\salt.\+$#eog "\1"\necho '"'\2'#p" | bash; }

These are just a bit shorter than the ones eigthmillion wrote, however his version didn't work as expected on my laptop for some reason (I got the title-tag first), so these build a command which is executed by bash.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
lynx --dump --source http://www.xkcd.com | grep `lynx --dump http://www.xkcd.com | egrep '(png|jpg)'` | grep title | cut -d = -f2,3 | cut -d '"' -f2,4 | sed -e 's/"/|/g' | awk -F"|" ' { system("display " $1);system("echo "$2); } '
2009-12-03 18:53:57
User: solarislackware
Functions: awk cut egrep grep
Tags: bash curl function xkcd comic webcomic
-1
Up
Down
View the newest xkcd comic.

Same thing just a different way to get there. You will need lynx

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

How do you execute it? I got this error:

local: 1: ?>: bad variable name

when I executed it like this:

local f=$(curl -s http://xkcd.com/);display $(echo "$f"|grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/[^"]+(png|jpg)');echo "$f"|awk '/<img src="http:\/\/imgs\.xkcd\.com\/comics\/.*?" title=.*/{gsub(/^.*title=.|".*?$/,"");print}';
Comment by andresmh 115 weeks ago

You execute it by pasting in the command as is on the command line (which defines a function called xkcd). Then you use it by simply writing "xkcd" on the command line.

Comment by anders 115 weeks ago

aha! thanks! :) how do you set it so it's always available, perhaps with a keyboard shortcut

Comment by andresmh 115 weeks ago

You can make it always available by pasting it in your .bashrc file.

Comment by eightmillion 115 weeks ago

Remember this does not work on ZSH for some reason.

Comment by matthewbauer 114 weeks and 5 days ago

Zsh doesn't allow declaring a variable local and assigning it at the same time, whereas bash does. This function can be made to work with zsh by separating the declaration and assignment like this:

xkcd(){ local f;f=$(curl -s http://xkcd.com/);display $(echo "$f"|grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/[^"]+(png|jpg)');echo "$f"|awk '/<img src="http:\/\/imgs\.xkcd\.com\/comics\/.*?" title=.*/{gsub(/^.*title=.|".*?$/,"");print}';}

And the same for the random version:

xkcdrandom(){ local f;f=$(wget -q http://dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random/ -O -);display $(echo "$f"|grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/[^"]+(png|jpg)');echo "$f"|awk '/<img src="http:\/\/imgs\.xkcd\.com\/comics\/.*?" title=.*/{gsub(/^.*title=.|".*?$/,"");print}';}
Comment by eightmillion 114 weeks and 5 days ago

Cute :]

Comment by thebodzio 114 weeks and 5 days ago

lynx --dump --source http://www.xkcd.com | grep `lynx --dump http://www.xkcd.com | egrep '(png|jpg)' | awk ' { print $0 } '

` | grep title | cut -d = -f2,3 | cut -d '"' -f2,4 | sed -e 's/"/|/g' | awk -F"|" ' { system("display " $1);system("echo "$2); } '

Comment by solarislackware 114 weeks and 1 day ago

Debian doesn't compile grep with the '-P' option; I've altered your command to use 'pcregrep' instead, which will work (I did have to use apt-get to install pcregrep).

xkcd(){ wget -qO- http://xkcd.com/|tee >(feh $(pcregrep -oo '(?<=")http://imgs[^/]+/comics/[^"]+\.\w{3}'))|pcregrep -o '(?<=(\w{3})" title=").*(?=" alt)';}
Comment by bartonski 105 weeks and 6 days ago

Thanks bartoniski. I usually try to include a version that doesn't use Perl compatible regexs, but didn't for this command. Grep's about the first thing I replace when I install Debian.

Comment by eightmillion 105 weeks and 6 days ago

A version that works in zsh and takes args for numbered comic, random comic, or leave blank for newest comic:

xkcd() { local comic="$1"; local xkcdurl; if [[ $comic == "random" ]]; then xkcdurl="http://dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random/"; else xkcdurl="http://xkcd.com/${comic// /+}"; fi; wget -qO- ${xkcdurl}|tee >(feh $(grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs[^/]+/comics/[^"]+\.\w{3}'))|grep -Po '(?<=(\w{3})" title=").*(?=" alt)';}
Comment by zoqaeski 76 weeks and 1 day ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts