Commands by metalx1000 (6)

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

Function to split a string into an array

For a $FILE, extracts the path, filename, filename without extension and extension.
Useful for use in other scripts for renaming, testing for extensions, etc.

Display which distro is installed

Sort the size usage of a directory tree by gigabytes, kilobytes, megabytes, then bytes.
Probably only works with GNU du and modern perls.

Insert commas to make reading numbers easier in the output of ls
This modifies the output of ls so that the file size has commas every three digits. It makes room for the commas by destructively eating any characters to the left of the size, which is probably okay since that's just the "group".   Note that I did not write this, I merely cleaned it up and shortened it with extended regular expressions. The original shell script, entitled "sl", came with this description:    : '  : For tired eyes (sigh), do an ls -lF plus whatever other flags you give  : but expand the file size with commas every 3 digits. Really helps me  : distinguish megabytes from hundreds of kbytes...  :  : Corey Satten, corey@cac.washington.edu, 11/8/89  : '   Of course, some may suggest that fancy new "human friendly" options, like "ls -Shrl", have made Corey's script obsolete. They are probably right. Yet, at times, still I find it handy. The new-fangled "human-readable" numbers can be annoying when I have to glance at the letter at the end to figure out what order of magnitude is even being talked about. (There's a big difference between 386M and 386P!). But with this nifty script, the number itself acts like a histogram, a quick visual indicator of "bigness" for tired eyes. :-)

Url Encode
This one uses hex conversion to do the converting and is in shell/sed only (should probably still use the python/perl version).

Search and play youtube videos directly to terminal (no X needed)
Same as other command, however uses youtube-dl internal search (thanks to qoxxxx mentioning this) It does however seem to be a little buggy and youtube-dl crashes sometimes. ## pyt 'Stairway to heaven - Led Zeppelin' pyt 'brain damage - Pink Floyd' No web browser or even X needed. Just a cli and internet connection! mplayer is pauseable and can skip ahead This may break if youtube changes their search html.

Split File in parts
Split File in 19 MB big parts, putting parts together again via cat Nameforpartaa Nameforpartab Nameforpartac >> File

Find the real procesor speed when you use CPU scaling [cpuspeed]
We don't use CPU scaling, but just in case you do, there is something interesting to note. If you look at the /proc/cpuinfo, the speed listed is current running speed of the processors and not the real speed of the chip.

temporarily override alias of any command
say, someone has aliased ls to 'ls --color=always' and you want to temporarily override the alias (it does not override functions)


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: