Commands by UnixNeko (4)

  • Check if a machine is online

    PING parameters c 1 limits to 1 pinging attempt q makes the command quiet (or silent mode) /dev/null 2>&1 is to remove the display && echo ONLINE is executed if previous command is successful (return value 0) || echo OFFLINE is executed otherwise (return value of 1 if unreachable or 2 if you're offline yourself). I personally use this command as an alias with a predefined machine name but there are at least 2 improvements that may be done. Asking for the machine name or IP Escaping the output so that it displays ONLINE in green and OFFLINE in red (for instance).


    9
    ping -c 1 -q MACHINE_IP_OR_NAME >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo ONLINE || echo OFFLINE
    UnixNeko · 2012-02-09 06:30:55 28
  • Extract a .gz file with privilege

    Extracting .gz files and placing the output in another directory in one command line is convenient thing. I just followed some how-to to install Nagios on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx but they give the method to install from archives. I wished to install from the repository. If you do so some files are missing. I've not tested yet but this is an example command line I did to extract sudo sh -c 'gunzip -c /usr/share/doc/nagios3-common/examples/template-object/templates.cfg.gz > /etc/nagios3/objects/templates.cfg' We need privilege to write the destination file. Show Sample Output


    0
    sudo sh -c 'gunzip -c source.gz > destination'
    UnixNeko · 2011-07-05 23:51:01 5
  • Rip CD

    Can be useful to rip a CD. Show Sample Output


    -1
    ripit -c 0 --outputdir $1 --nosubmission
    UnixNeko · 2011-06-12 12:29:26 4
  • Reload gnome-panel

    I have some problems with gnome panel which does not load completely leaving me without the actual GUI. This commands helps to kill the gnome-panel process then it should be relaunch automatically.


    -2
    pgrep -lf gnome-panel | awk '{if ($2=="gnome-panel") print $1}' | xargs kill -9
    UnixNeko · 2011-06-12 12:23:27 16

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

openssl Generate Self Signed SSL Certifcate
generating self signed ssl certificate to use in dovecot postfix nginx Self signed certificates can be used for private encryptions between server and client and must be manually accepted on browser/ client

Replace "space" char with "dot" char in current directory file names

split a file by a specific number of lines
Splits the file "my_file" every 500 lines. Will create files called xx01 xx02 and so on. You can change the prefix by using the -f option. Comes in handy for splitting logfiles for example. I am using it for feeding a logfile parser with smaller files instead of one big file (due to performance reasons)

list files recursively by size

Recursive find and replace file extension / suffix (mass rename files)
Find recursively all files in ~/Notes with the extension '.md' and pipe that via xargs to rename command, which will replace every '.md' to '.txt' in this example (existing files will not be overwritten).

Get playlist for Livestream on YouTube

list files recursively by size

delete duplicate lines from a file and keep the order of the other lines
i wanted to delete all duplicate lines from .bash_history and keep the order of the other lines. the command cat's the file and adds line numbers, then sorts by the second column. afterwards uniq omits repeated lines, but skips the first field (the line number). then it sorts by the line numbers and at the end cuts the numbers off.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

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"

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: