Commands by fzero (4)

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Put split files back together, without a for loop
After splitting a file, put them all back together a lot faster then doing $cat file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 > mainfile or $for i in {0..5}; do cat file$i > mainfile; done When splitting, be sure to do split -d for getting numbers instead of letters

write the output of a command to /var/log/user.log... each line will contain $USER, making this easy to grep for.
This command is useful if you want to copy the output of a series of commands to a file, for example if you want to pastebin the output from 'uname -a', 'lspci -vvv' and 'lsmod' for video driver trouble-shooting on your favorite Linux forum. 'log' takes all the following arguments as a command to execute, with STDOUT sent to /var/log/user.log. The command is echoed to the log before it is executed. The advantages of using logger (as opposed to appending output from commands to a file) are 1) commands are always appended to the logs... you don't have to worry about clobbering your log file accidentally by using '>' rather than '>>' 2) logs are automatically cleaned up by logrotate. The following functions allow you to mark the start and end of a section of /var/log/user.log. $ startlog() { export LOGMARK=$(date +%Y.%m.%d_%H:%M:%S); echo "$LOGMARK.START" | logger -t $USER; } then $ endlog() { echo "$LOGMARK.END" | logger -t $USER; } printlog will print all lines between $LOGMARK.START and $LOGMARK.END, removing everything that is prepended to each line by logger. $ printlog() { sudo sed -n -e "/$LOGMARK.START/,/$LOGMARK.END/p" /var/log/user.log| sed "s/.*$USER: //"; } The following command should dump just about all the information that you could possibly want about your linux configuration into the clipboard. $ startlog; for cmd in 'uname -a' 'cat /etc/issue' 'dmesg' 'lsusb' 'lspci' 'sudo lshw' 'lsmod'; do log $cmd; done; endlog; printlog | xsel --clipboard This is ready for a trip to http://pastebin.com/, and you don't have to worry about leaving temporary files lying around cluttering up $HOME. Caveats: I'm sure that startlog, endlog, and printlog could use some cleanup and error checking... there are unchecked dependencies between printlog and endlog, as well as between endlog and startlog. It might be useful for 'log' to send stderr to logger as well.

Poor man's nmap for a class C network from rfc1918
What do you do when nmap is not available and you want to see the hosts responding to an icmp echo request ? This one-liner will print all hosts responding with their ipv4 address.

get colorful side-by-side diffs of files in svn with vim
This will diff your local version of the file with the latest version in svn. I put this in a shell function like so: $svd() { vimdiff

GRUB2: set Super Mario as startup tune
I'll let Slayer handle that. Raining Blood for your pleasure.

Keep track of diff progress
You're running a program that reads LOTS of files and takes a long time. But it doesn't tell you about its progress. First, run a command in the background, e.g. $ find /usr/share/doc -type f -exec cat {} + > output_file.txt Then run the watch command. "watch -d" highlights the changes as they happen In bash: $! is the process id (pid) of the last command run in the background. You can change this to $(pidof my_command) to watch something in particular.

df output, sorted by Use% and correctly maintaining header row
Show disk space info, grepping out the uninteresting ones beginning with ^none while we're at it. The main point of this submission is the way it maintains the header row with the command grouping, by removing it from the pipeline before it gets fed into the sort command. (I'm surprised sort doesn't have an option to skip a header row, actually..) It took me a while to work out how to do this, I thought of it as I was drifting off to sleep last night!

Extract public key from private
This will extract the public key that is stored in the private key using openssl.

Annotate tail -f with timestamps


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