Commands by Ben (2)

  • find and grep Word docs

    Find Word docs by filename in the current directory, convert each of them to plain text using antiword (taking care of spaces in filenames), then grep for a search term in the particular file. (Of course, it's better to save your data as plain text to make for easier grepping, but that's not always possible.) Requires antiword. Or you can modify it to use catdoc instead.


    3
    find . -iname '*filename*.doc' | { while read line; do antiword "$line"; done; } | grep -C4 search_term;
    Ben · 2009-07-28 15:49:58 1
  • search manpages on the internets

    manview searches man pages on the internets in case the man command doesn't work for some reason or if you think the man pages in Cornell's flavor of Solaris might differ from yours. It dumps the manpage info from lynx to less, so it ends up looking remarkably like a real manpage. Put it in your .bash_profile or .bashrc, and then you can use it like a regular command: typing "manview ssh" will give you the manpage for ssh.


    0
    manview() { lynx -dump -accept_all_cookies 'http://www.csuglab.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/adm/man.cgi?section=all&topic='"$1" | less; }
    Ben · 2009-03-11 19:02:11 1

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

Mount a Windows share on the local network (Ubuntu) with user rights and use a specific samba user

Colored diff ( via vim ) on 2 remotes files on your local computer.
You can use $ vim scp://[email protected]//file too in a simple case.

randomize hostname and mac address, force dhcp renew. (for anonymous networking)
this string of commands will release your dhcp address, change your mac address, generate a new random hostname and then get a new dhcp lease.

Convert deb to rpm
converts between Red Hat rpm, Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats ... It also supports LSB packages.

cat stdout of multiple commands
Concatenate the stdout of multiple commands.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Better git diff, word delimited and colorized
Define a git alias then git dcolor

Pick a random line from a file

monitor a tail -f command with multiple processes
when using named pipes only one reader is given the output by default. Also, most commands piped to by grep use a buffer which save output until tail -f finishes, which is not convenient. Here, using a combination of tee, sub-processes and the --line-buffered switch in grep we can workaround the problem.

List all available python modules

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: