Commands by geekboxjockey (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

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Rename files in batch

diff will usually only take one file from STDIN. This is a method to take the result of two streams and compare with diff. The example I use to compare two iTunes libraries but it is generally applicable.
diff is designed to compare two files. You can also compare directories. In this form, bash uses 'process substitution' in place of a file as an input to diff. Each input to diff can be filtered as you choose. I use find and egrep to select the files to compare.

ssh batch jobs: query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command
Need to query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command ? Of course you'll have setup keys on all your remote HOSTs. But in the case a key is not present this command will skip that node, proceeding on to the next. -t: Force pseudo-tty allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine. Also prevents unwanted stty messages being sent to console -q: Quiet mode. -o "BatchMode yes" If set to yes, passphrase/password querying will be disabled. This option is useful in scripts and other batch jobs where no user is present

txt2html
Convert Text to HTML

Url Encode
Converts reserved characters in a URI to their percent encoded counterparts. Alternate python version: $ echo "$url" | python -c 'import sys,urllib;print urllib.quote(sys.stdin.read().strip())'

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

Delete specific sender in mailq

List installed deb packages by size

Quick and dirty convert to flash
This converts any media ffmpeg handles to flash. It would actually convert anything to anything, it's based on the file extension. It doesn't do ANY quality control, sizing, etc, it just does what it thinks is best. I needed an flv for testing, and this spits one out easily.

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: