Commands by gabriel (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

execute a command in case of success or execute a command in case of failure

Update zone file Serial numbers
Will edit *.db files in the same directory with todays date. Useful for doing a mass update to domains on a nameserver, adding spf records, etc. Looks for a string starting with 200 or 201 followed by 7 numbers, and replaces with todays date. This won't overwrite Ip's but i would still do some double checking after running this. Make sure your server's date is correct, otherwise insert your own serial number. $rndc reload should usually follow this command.

Create a bash script from last n commands
Uses history to get the last n+1 commands (since this command will appear as the most recent), then strips out the line number and this command using sed, and appends the commands to a file.

Google text-to-speech in local language or language of choice
Google text-to-speech in your local language or in language of choice via country code switch (ISO 639-1).

How to backup hard disk timely?
'data' is the directory to backup, 'backup' is directory to store snapshots. Backup files on a regular basis using hard links. Very efficient, quick. Backup data is directly available. Same as explained here : http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html in one line. Using du to check the size of your backups, the first backup counts for all the space, and other backups only files that have changed.

find and grep Word docs
Find Word docs by filename in the current directory, convert each of them to plain text using antiword (taking care of spaces in filenames), then grep for a search term in the particular file. (Of course, it's better to save your data as plain text to make for easier grepping, but that's not always possible.) Requires antiword. Or you can modify it to use catdoc instead.

View Processeses like a fu, fu
I don't truly enjoy many commands more than this one, which I alias to be ps1.. Cool to be able to see the heirarchy and makes it clearer what need to be killed, and whats really going on.

Normalize volume output in MPlayer
Works really well for playing DVDs, which have the volume turned way down for some reason. The `2' method is better IMHO because it will adjust to changing loud/soft parts. If you want to add it to your ~/.mplayer/config: # format: volnorm[=method:target] # method: # 1: use single sample (default) # 2: multiple samples # target: # default is 0.25 af-add=volnorm=2:0.75

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Extended man command
This microscript looks up a man page for each word possible, and if the correct page is not found, uses w3m and Google's "I'm feeling lucky" to output a first possible result. This script was made as a result of an idea on a popular Linux forum, where users often send other people to RTFM by saying something like "man backup" or "man ubuntu one". To make this script replace the usual man command, save it as ".man.sh" in your home folder and add the following string to the end of your .bashrc file: alias man='~/.man.sh'


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: