Commands by maelcum (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

Interactively build regular expressions
txt2regex can be interactive or noninteractive and generates regular expressions for a variety of dialects based on user input. In interactive mode, the regex string builds as you select menu options. The sample output here is from noninteractive mode, try running it standalone and see for yourself. It's written in bash and is available as the 'txt2regex' package at least under debian/ubuntu.

Have a random "cow" say a random thing
You need to have fortune and cowsay installed. It uses a subshell to list cow files in you cow directory (this folder is default for debian based systems, others might use another folder). you can add it to your .bashrc file to have it great you with something interesting every time you start a new session.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

pipe output to notify-send
you can put almost any command. $notify-send -t 0 "MOTD" "$(sed -n '/#^4/,/#$4/{/#^4\|#$4/!p}' motd2 | cut -d# -f2)" $notify-send -t 0 "readfile" "$(while read mess; do echo $mess;done < motd2)"

Push your present working directory to a stack that you can pop later
If are a Bash user and you are in a directory and need to go else where for a while but don't want to lose where you were, use pushd instead of cd. cd /home/complicated/path/.I/dont/want/to/forget pushd /tmp cd thing/in/tmp popd (returns you to /home/complicated/path/.I/dont/want/to/forget)

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"

Pretty Print a simple csv in the command line
Splits the input based on commas and prints it in a nice column format. This would not work for CSV rows that have "," between quotes or with newline characters. Use only simple simple csv files.

Convert spaces in file names to underscores

Bitcoin Brainwallet Base58 Encoder
A bitcoin "brainwallet" is a secret passphrase you carry in your brain. The Bitcoin Brainwallet Private Key Base58 Encoder is the third of three functions needed to calculate a bitcoin PRIVATE key from your "brainwallet" passphrase. This base58 encoder uses the obase parameter of the amazing bc utility to convert from ASCII-hex to base58. Tech note: bc inserts line continuation backslashes, but the "read s" command automatically strips them out. I hope that one day base58 will, like base64, be added to the amazing openssl utility.


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: