Commands by ecto (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

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Prints new content of files
Useful to e.g. keep an eye on several logfiles.

pid of manually selecting window

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" }

list current processes writing to hard drive

Define Google Chrome urpmi media source for Mandriva/Mageia (works for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems)
This command adds a urpmi media source called "google-chrome" to the urpmi configuration on Mandriva or Mageia. Needs to be run as root. We specify the option "--update" so that when Google provides a newer version of Google Chrome web browser in their download system then running a system update (eg: "urpmi --auto-update") will result in our copy of Google Chrome getting updated (along with any other Mandriva/Mageia pending updates). To install Google Chrome from this source, use: urpmi google-chrome-stable #install Google chrome web browser

Change pidgin status
Changes pidgin status using its dbus interface. The status code can be obtained using command #4543.

Find the annual salary of any White House staffer.
Query the Socrata Open Data API being used by the White House to find any employee's salary using curl, grep and awk. Change the value of the search parameter (example uses Axelrod) to the name of any White House staffer to see their annual salary.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Pick a random line from a file
This is from perldoc -q random.*line, which says: This has a significant advantage in space over reading the whole file in. You can find a proof of this method in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, Section 3.4.2, by Donald E. Knuth. Who am I to argue with Don Knuth?


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: