Commands by fooBier (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

Edit a script that's somewhere in your path.
Often I need to edit a bash or perl script I've written. I know it's in my path but I don't feel like typing the whole path (or I don't remember the path).

Text message on wallpaper
Display some text on the wallpaper especially warning messages

Download latest NVIDIA Geforce x64 Windows driver
Download latest NVIDIA Geforce x64 Windows7-8 driver from Nvidia's website. Pulls the latest download version (which includes beta). This is the "English" version. The following command includes a 'sed' line to replace "english" with "international" if needed. You can also replace the starting subdomain with "eu." "uk." and others. Enjoy this one liner! 1 character under the max :) $wget "us.download.nvidia.com$(wget -qO- "$(wget -qO- "nvidia.com/Download/processFind.aspx?psid=95&pfid=695&osid=19&lid=1&lang=en-us" | awk '/driverResults.aspx/ {print $4}' | cut -d "'" -f2 | head -n 1)" | awk '/url=/ {print $2}' | sed -e "s/english/international/" | cut -d '=' -f3 | cut -d '&' -f1)"

Create a 5 MB blank file via a seek hole
Similar to the original, but is much faster since it only needs to write the last byte as zero. A diff on testfile and testfile.seek will return that they are the same.

Prepend section dates to individual entries in a summary log file
Searches for dates on lines by themselves. Uses that date to prepend all rows that contain SEARCHSTRING with the date, until it reaches another line with a date by itself. This fixed an issue with a specific log export where there would be a date, followed by all of the entries for that date.

grep -v with multiple patterns.
Use multiple patterns with grep -v. So you can print all lines in a file except those containing the multiple patterns you specify.

Convert all .wav to .mp3
Audio convert is a script that uses zenity and lame to transcode virtually any format to any other format provided you have the libraries installed to do so.

Display disk partition sizes
Use lsbk (list block) and jq (to manipulate a JSON on the command line) to display partition information:

create an screenshot, upload it to your server via scp and then open that screenshot in firefox
I often need to send screenshots to other people to explain settings and whatever. So I created this oneline which I use to create the screenshot with imagemagik, upload it via scp to my server and then the command opens an firefox tab with the screenshot. The screenshot can be a region or a window. You just have to replace the parts beginning with YOUR.

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions
probably just like 1204, but uses tee as a filter (+ I actually understand how this one works)

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: