Commands by llama (3)

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

Video Google download
Download google video with wget. Or, if you wish, pass video URL to ie mplayer to view as stream. 1. VURL: replace with url. I.e. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=12312312312312313# 2. OUPUT_FILE : optionally change to a more suited name. This is the downloaded file. I.e. foo.flv # Improvements greatly appreciated. (close to my first linux command after ls -A :) ) Breakedown pipe by pipe: 1. wget: html from google, pass to stdout 2. grep: get the video url until thumbnailUrl (not needed) 3. grep: Strip off everything before http:// 4. sed: urldecode 5. echo: hex escapes 6. sed: stipr of tailing before thumbnailUrl 7. wget: download. Here one could use i.e. mplayer or other...

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"

Transfer SSH public key to another machine in one step
This command sequence allows simple setup of (gasp!) password-less SSH logins. Be careful, as if you already have an SSH keypair in your ~/.ssh directory on the local machine, there is a possibility ssh-keygen may overwrite them. ssh-copy-id copies the public key to the remote host and appends it to the remote account's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. When trying ssh, if you used no passphrase for your key, the remote shell appears soon after invoking ssh user@host.

Convert numbers to SI notation
converts any number on the 'stdin' to SI notation. My version limits to 3 digits of precious (working with 10% resistors).

Connect to remote machine with other enconding charset

repeat a command every one second
Short method of "while x=0; do foo ; sleep 1 ; done"

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

clear the X clipboard
Clears your clipboard if xsel is installed on your machine. If your xsel is dumb, you can also use $xsel --clear --clipboard

tar+pbzip2 a dir

Generate SSH public key from the private key

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: