Commands by bugmenot (81)

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

ping a host until it responds, then play a sound, then exit
Audio acknowledgement for host availability. When running the command from a Linux systems, you can use "festival" or "espeak" instead of "say".

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" }

Dump dvd from a different machine onto this one.
You can use this to directly dump from machine A (with dvd drive) to machine B (without dvd drive) . I used this to copy dvd using my friend's machine to my netbook. Above command is to be issued on machine B. Advantages : 1) No wasting time dumping first to machine A and then copying to Machine B. 2) You dont need to use space on Machine A. In fact, this will work even when Machine A doesnt have enough hdd space to dump the DVD. Use -C ssh option on slow networks (enables compression). you can replace "dd if=/dev/dvd" with any ripping command as long as it spews the iso to stdout.

Binary clock
Like 7171, but fixed typo, uses fewer variables, and even more cryptic!

Display email addresses that have been sent to by a postfix server since the last mail log rollover
This assumes your mail log is /var/log/mail.log

generate random password
for Mac OS X

MSDOS command to check existance of command and exit batch if failed
This is a command to be used inside of MS-DOS batch files to check existence of commands as preconditions before actual batch processing can be started. If the command is found, batch script continues execution. If not, a message is printed on screen, script then waits for user pressing a key and exits. An error message of the command itself is suppressed for clarity purpose.

Simple server which listens on a port and prints out received data
Sometimes you need a simple server which listens on a port and prints out received data. Example: Consider you want to know, which data is posted by a homepage to a remote script without analysing the html code! A simple way to do this is to save the page to your computer, substitude all action="address" with action="localhost:portnumber", run 'ncat -l portnumber' and open the edited page with your browser. If you then submit the form, ncat will print out the http-protocol with all the posted data.

zsh suffix to inform you about long command ending
make, find and a lot of other programs can take a lot of time. And can do not. Supppose you write a long, complicated command and wonder if it will be done in 3 seconds or 20 minutes. Just add "R" (without quotes) suffix to it and you can do other things: zsh will inform you when you can see the results. You can replace zenity with other X Window dialogs program.

Remove all unused kernels with apt-get
This will remove all installed kernels on your debian based install, except the one you're currently using. From: http://tuxtweaks.com/2009/12/remove-old-kernels-in-ubuntu/comment-page-1/#comment-1590


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: