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).

Function to solve a simple combinatorial maths puzzle from the command line

Terminal - Function to solve a simple combinatorial maths puzzle from the command line
marbles () { c=''; for i in $(seq $1); do c+='{b,r}'; done; x=$(eval echo $c); p=''; for i in $(seq $2); do p+='b*r'; done; y=$(grep -wo "${p}b*" <<< $x); wc -l <<< "$y"; grep -vc 'rr' <<< "$y"; }
2010-08-27 23:04:33
User: quintic
Functions: echo eval grep seq wc
-4
Up
Down
Function to solve a simple combinatorial maths puzzle from the command line

Suppose you have 11 marbles, 4 of which are red, the rest being blue. The marbles are indistinguishable, apart from colour. How many different ways are there to arrange the marbles in a line? And how many ways are there to arrange them so that no two red marbles are adjacent?

There are simple mathematical solutions to these questions, but it's also possible to generate and count all possibilities directly on the command line, using little more than brace expansion, grep and wc!

The answer to the question posed above is that there are 330 ways of arranging the marbles in a line, 70 of which have no two red marbles adjacent. See the sample output.

To follow the call to marbles 11 4: after c=''; for i in $(seq $1); do c+='{b,r}'; done;, $c equals {b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}{b,r}

After x=$(eval echo $c), and brace expansion, $x equals bbbbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbbr ... rrrrrrrrrrb rrrrrrrrrrr, which is all 2^11 = 2048 strings of 11 b's and r's.

After p=''; for i in $(seq $2); do p+='b*r'; done;, $p equals b*rb*rb*rb*r

Next, after y=$(grep -wo "${p}b*"

Finally, grep -vc 'rr'

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 33 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts