Commands by mph (1)

  • Change a text files contents without opening it, or intermediate files.

    If you've ever wanted to change a text files contents without having to create an intermediate file. This is it. Ex is a part of vim. The command as given will delete ALL lines containing "delete this line" from the file. More Examples: print '%s/'this is a line'/'that is not the same line'/g\nwq' | ex file.txt will substitute the first string with the second string. print '3a\n'Inserted Line'\n.\n\nwq' | ex file.txt will insert the given line after line 3. CAVEAT, Some distro's like the print command, others like echo with this command. Also note there are NO error messages on failure, at least that I've ever seen. Ex can also be quite fussy as to how it takes strings, parameters, etc... I use at&t's ksh syntax may very with other shells.


    0
    print 'g/'delete this line'/delete\nwq' | ex file.txt
    mph · 2009-07-20 19:15:29 7

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

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Redefine the cd command's behavior
Often, the very next command after the cd command is 'ls', so why not combine them?. Tested on a Red Hat derivative and Mac OS X Leopard Update: changed ${1:-$HOME} to "${@:-$HOME}" to accomodate directories with spaces in the names

Convert decimal numbers to binary
Convert some decimal numbers to binary numbers. You could also build a general base-converter: $ function convBase { echo "ibase=$1; obase=$2; $3" | bc; } then you could write $ function decToBun { convBase 10 2 $1; }

quit gvim remotely

See system users

Report information about executable launched on system
Aureport is a tool for displaying auditd system log. -x options cause to display launched executable on system. Aureport work with auditd so auditd must be installed an running on a system. Tested on CentOS / Debian

Ultimate current directory usage command
An NCurses version of the famous old 'du' unix command

Eavesdrop on your system
This command takes a snapshot of the open files for a PID 1234 then waits 10 seconds and takes another snapshot of the same PID, it then displays the difference between each snapshot to give you an insight into what the application is doing.

Finds all files from / on down over specified size.
Very useful for finding all files over a specified size, such as out of control log files chewing up all available disk space. Fedora Core x specific version.

use vi key bindings at the command line

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: