Commands by awoods (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

Print all open regular files sorted by the number of file handles open to each.
This command run fine on my Ubuntu machine, but on Red Hat I had to change the awk command to `awk '{print $10}'`.

connect via ssh using mac address
Connect to a machine running ssh using mac address by using the "arp" command

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs
Simply change the years listed in the first seq, and it will print out all the months in that span of years that have Friday the 13ths in them.

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"

execute your commands hiding secret bits from history records
$ wget --user=username --password="$password" http://example.org/ Instead of hiding commands entirely from history, I prefer to use "read" to put the password into a variable, and then use that variable in the commands instead of the password. Without the "-e" and "-s" it should work in any bourne-type shell, but the -s is what makes sure the password doesn't get echoed to the screen at all. (-e makes editing work a bit better)

Disco lights in the terminal
Looks best in an 80x24 256-color terminal emulator.

Convert PNG to GIF
(relies on 'imagemagick') Convert all .png files to .gif. This can also go the other way if you reverse the file extensions in the command, e.g.: $ for file in *.gif; do convert "$file" "$(basename $file .gif).png"; done If the file is named 'example1.png' it will be named 'example1.gif' when it is complete.

Move all comments the top of the file in vim
Python comments begin with a #. Modify to suit other languages. Other uses: Instead of m0 use m$ for end of file or d for deleting all comments.

view the system memory in clear text
see what's in your memory right now... sometimes you find passwords, account numbers and url's that were recently used. Anyone have a safe command to clear the memory without rebooting?

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: