Commands by jonty (6)

  • Use vi commands to edit your command lines

    If you spend all day editing in vi then switching your fingers to Emacs mode just for the command line can be difficult. Use set -o vi in your bash shell and enjoy the power of a real editor.


    1
    set -o vi; ls -l jnuk<ESC>bCjunk
    jonty · 2009-02-05 22:58:51 0
  • The simplest way to transport information over a network

    Einstein's razor: As simple as possible, but not simpler. On the destination machine netcat listens on any port (1234 in the example) and sends anything it receives into a file or pipe. On the source machine a separate netcat takes input from a file or pipe and sends it over the network to the listener. This is great between machines on a LAN where you don't care about authentication, encryption, or compression and I would recommend it for being simpler than anything else in this situation. Over the internet you should use something with better security.


    3
    (on destination machine) nc -l 1234 > whatever; (on source machine) nc destination 1234 < whatever;
    jonty · 2009-02-05 21:35:08 0
  • Getting started with tcpdump

    At some point you want to know what packets are flowing on your network. Use tcpdump for this. The man page is obtuse, to say the least, so here are some simple commands to get you started. -n means show IP numbers and don't try to translate them to names. -l means write a line as soon as it is ready. -i eth0 means trace the packets flowing through the first ethernet interface. src or dst w.x.y.z traces only packets going to or from IP address w.x.y.z. port 80 traces only packets for HTTP. proto udp traces only packets for UDP protocol. Once you are happy with each option combine them with 'and' 'or' 'not' to get the effects you want.


    2
    tcpdump -nli eth0; tcpdump -nli eth0 src or dst w.x.y.z; tcpdump -nli eth0 port 80; tcpdump -nli eth0 proto udp
    jonty · 2009-02-05 17:41:55 0
  • Start a new command in a new screen window

    If you are already running screen then you often want to start a command in a fresh window. You use this alias by typing 's whatever' from your command line and 'whatever' starts running in a new window. Good with interactive commands like info, vim, and nethack.


    19
    alias s='screen -X screen'; s top; s vi; s man ls;
    jonty · 2009-02-05 13:47:14 1
  • Get me yesterday's date, even if today is 1-Mar-2008 and yesterday was 29-Feb-2008

    Fool date by setting the timezone out by 24 hours and you get yesterday's date. Try TZ=XYZ-24 to get tomorrow's date. I live in TZ=GMT0BST so you might need to shift the number 24 by the hours in your timezone.


    1
    TZ=XYZ24 date
    jonty · 2009-02-05 13:27:14 2
  • Link all the files in this directory to that directory

    I find this handy for linking all the bin files in a package to /usr/bin or all the man files to /usr/share/man. You can replace * with */* to operate on all the files in subdirectories.


    0
    cd /this/directory; for f in *; do ln -s `pwd`/$f /that/directory; done
    jonty · 2009-02-05 13:21:16 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"

Install a basic FreeBSD system
Install a basic FreeBSD system on a distant server. I use this to install FreeBSD on servers that can only boot a Linux rescue system. This sytem loads on ram when booted, so it is possible to install freely. You can even install on ZFS root !

Know which modules are loaded on an Apache server
This let you know which modules has loaded the Apache server, very useful to know if the mod_rewrite is ready to use.

Execute MySQL query send results from stdout to CSV
You can, of course, tell MySQL to output results to a file and dictate how to terminate lines, etc. But sometimes you don't have access to the file system MySQL is running on, complicating outputting your results to a CSV, necessitating either annoying hacks or this simple command :D

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Mount directories in different locations
Like symlinked directories, you can mount a directory at a different location. For example mounting a directory from one location in to the http root without having to make your program follow symlinks or change permissions when reading.

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

An alarm clock using xmms2 and at
I like the order of the arguments better this way.

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.

search ubuntu packages to find which package contains the executable program programname
search ubuntu's remote package source repositories for a specific program to see which package contains it

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: