Commands by forrestcannon (0)

  • bash: commands not found

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List all symbolic links in current directory
For those who don't have the symlinks command, you can use readlink. This command is not straightforward because readlink is very picky. The backslash in front of 'ls' means not to use an alias (e.g. color escape codes from an aliased 'ls' could mess up readlink), and the -1 (one) means to print the entries separated by newlines. xargs -l (the letter L) means to process each input separated by newlines as separate commands.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

grep tab chars
mixing tabs and spaces for indentation in python would confuse the python interpreter, to avoid that, check if the file has any tab based indentation. "^V" => denotes press control + v and press tab within quotes. $ cat improper_indent.py class Tux(object): print "Hello world.." $ grep " " improper_indent.py print "Hello world.."

Fix borked character coding in a tty.
Often you find some tty programs are messed up and confused about character encoding - 'man' is a common problem and sometimes displays weird characters for apostrophes, hyphens etc etc. Another class of programs that suffer from this are those that try to use the line drawing characters - eg RedHat's tty system admin functions such as system-config-firewall-tui system-config-network-tui etc. Adding 'LC_ALL=C' fixes most of these problems (as long as you want English! Perhaps speakers of other languages can add a comment here). For bonus points, I've added the '-c' option to the man command so that it ignores it's cache and re-computes the man page using the C locale.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Generate random number with shuf
If you don't have seq or shuf, bash can be used.

Check host port access using only Bash:

get a desktop notification from the terminal
tired of switching to the console to check if some command has finished yet? if notify-send does not work on your box try this one... e.g. rsync -av -e /usr/bin/lsh $HOME slowconnection.bar:/mnt/backup ; z (now fire up X, do something useful, get notified if this stuff has finished).

create random string from /dev/urandom (or another length)

Use tee to process a pipe with two or more processes
Tee can be used to split a pipe into multiple streams for one or more process to work it. You can add more " >()" for even more fun.


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