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).

Watch the progress of 'dd'

Terminal - Watch the progress of 'dd'
pkill -USR1 ^dd$
2010-05-14 16:25:01
User: atoponce
3
Up
Down
Watch the progress of 'dd'

The 'dd' command doesn't provide a progress when writing data. So, sending the "USR1" signal to the process will spit out its progress as it writes data. This command is superior to others on the site, as it doesn't require you to previously know the PID of the dd command.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
dd if=/dev/zero | pv | dd of=/dev/null
2010-05-14 16:58:42
User: richard
Functions: dd
Tags: dd pv
7
Up
Down
Watch the progress of 'dd'

need pv (pipe view) :

http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null
2010-05-14 17:37:03
User: twjolson
Tags: dd kill pkill
1
Up
Down
Watch the progress of 'dd'

dcfldd is a forensic version of dd that shows a process indicator by default.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

You say its superior but you might not realize that if you're running this as root and there are other users on the system also running dd (I'll admit its not likely), then you're also going to make their dd processes print out their status, which they might not want.

The truly superior thing would be if there was a key sequence similar to Ctrl-C that would send a USR1 to the process in the fg.

Comment by deltaray 157 weeks and 1 day ago

true, but what's the likelihood of that happening? really? the only time you use 'dd' is for administrative purposes, like creating swap files, or overwriting data. any other use of dd means you're likely using the wrong utility. :)

Comment by atoponce 157 weeks and 1 day ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts