Commands by chmouel (4)

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

List the largest directories & subdirectoties in the current directory sorted from largest to smallest.

Share your terminal session (remotely or whatever)
Force the user you want to watch doing things into doing his things in a screen session. Then simply attach yourself to that session with the command shown above. Works only if you are on the same machine, of course

Create A Continuous Yahoo! News Ticker For The Terminal
This creates a permanent stock ticker in the terminal. it has scrolling action and refreshes when each cycle is done to get the latest news.

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"

pass the output of some command to a new email in the default email client
This depends on 'stripansi' and 'urlencode' commands, which exist on my system as these aliases: $ alias stripansi='perl -ple "s/\033\[(?:\d*(?:;\d+)*)*m//g;"' $ alias urlencode='perl -MURI::Escape -ne "\$/=\"\"; print uri_escape \$_"' The `open` command handles URLs on a Mac. Substitute the equivalent for your system (perhaps gnome-open). I don't use system `mail`, so I have this aliased as `mail` and use it this way: $ git show head | mail

how to export a table in .csv file
Exports the result of query in a csv file

Edit all files found having a specific string found by grep
The grep switches eliminate the need for awk and sed. Modifying vim with -p will show all files in separate tabs, -o in separate vim windows. Just wish it didn't hose my terminal once I exit vim!!

Batch-Convert text file containing youtube links to mp3

Short one line while loop that outputs parameterized content from one file to another
There is a common command for outputting a field or list of fields from each line in a file. Why wouldn't you just use cut?

A function to find the newest file in a directory
Works recusivley in the specified dir or '.' if none given. Repeatedly calls 'find' to find a newer file, when no newer files exist you have the newest. In this case 'newest' means most recently modified. To find the most recently created change -newer to -cnewer.


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: