Commands by jazznjam (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

Display EPOCH time in human readable format using AWK.

Append stdout and stderr to a file, and print stderr to the screen [bash]
Useful for cron jobs -- all output will be logged but only errors will cause email to be sent. NB the order of "2>&1" and ">> logfile" is important, it doesn't work if you reverse them (everything goes to the logfile, nothing left for tee).

Manually Pause/Unpause Firefox Process with POSIX-Signals
Continue with: $killall -CONT -m firefox Suspends all Firefox Threads. Results in Zero CPU load. Useful when having 100+ Tabs open and you temporarily need the power elsewhere. Be careful - might produce RACE CONDITIONS or LOCKUPS in other processes or FF itself. matching is case sensitive.

runs a bash script in debugging mode

Check if you work on a virtual/physical machine in Linux
Command used to know if we are working on a virtual or physical machine. This command will use the dmidecode utility to retrieve hardware information of your computer via the BIOS. Run this command as root or with sudo.

Url Encode
Returns URL Encoded string from input ($1).

creating you're logging function for your script
You could also pipe to logger.

socat TCP-LISTEN:5500 EXEC:'ssh user@remotehost "socat STDIO UNIX-CONNECT:/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock"'
Listens on local port 5500 and connects to remotehost with username user to tunnel the given socket file. Will work with anything, but can be useful if there's a need for a local application to connect with a remote server which was started without networking.

ThePirateBay.org torrent search
This one-liner greps first 30 direct URLs for .torrent files matching your search querry, ordered by number of seeds (descending; determined by the second number after your querry, in this case 7; for other options just check the site via your favorite web-browser). You don't have to care about grepping the torrent names as well, because they are already included in the .torrent URL (except for spaces and some other characters replaced by underscores, but still human-readable). Be sure to have some http://isup.me/ macro handy (someone often kicks the ethernet cables out of their servers ;) ). I've also coded a more user-friendly ash (should be BASH compatible) script, which also lists the total size of download and number of seeds/peers (available at http://saironiq.blogspot.com/2011/04/my-shell-scripts-4-thepiratebayorg.html - may need some tweaking, as it was written for a router running OpenWrt and transmission). Happy downloading!

do a full file listing of every file found with locate

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: