Commands by BigCow (2)

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

ThePirateBay.org torrent search
This one-liner greps first 30 direct URLs for .torrent files matching your search querry, ordered by number of seeds (descending; determined by the second number after your querry, in this case 7; for other options just check the site via your favorite web-browser). You don't have to care about grepping the torrent names as well, because they are already included in the .torrent URL (except for spaces and some other characters replaced by underscores, but still human-readable). Be sure to have some http://isup.me/ macro handy (someone often kicks the ethernet cables out of their servers ;) ). I've also coded a more user-friendly ash (should be BASH compatible) script, which also lists the total size of download and number of seeds/peers (available at http://saironiq.blogspot.com/2011/04/my-shell-scripts-4-thepiratebayorg.html - may need some tweaking, as it was written for a router running OpenWrt and transmission). Happy downloading!

Sort disk usage from directories
Sort disk usage from directories in the current directory

Auto download Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with super fast zsync
Need to have rc iso pre-downloaded before running command.

Create a backdoor on a machine to allow remote connection to bash
My netcat (nc-1.84-10.fc6) doesn't have the -e option, so I have to do it like this. Of course, instead of bash, you can use any executable, including scripts.

copy with progress bar - rsync
-r for recursive (if you want to copy entire directories) src for the source file (or wildcards) dst for the destination --progress to show a progress bar

temporarily override alias of any command
say, someone has aliased ls to 'ls --color=always' and you want to temporarily override the alias (it does not override functions)

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

Show allocated disk space:

Display a list of all PHP classes that are called statically
Searches all .php files for a static instantiation of a class and displays the class names along with their frequencies.

List .log files open by a pid
Uses lsof to display the full path of ".log" files opened by a specified PID.


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: