Commands by mutiny1939 (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

Search commandlinefu.com from the command line using the API
Search for one/many words on commandlinefu, results in vim for easy copy, manipulation. The -R flag is for readonly mode...you can still write to a file, but vim won't prompt for save on quit. What I'd really like is a way to do this from within vim in a new tab. Something like $ :Tex path/to/file but $ :cmdfu search terms

One liner to kill a process when knowing only the port where the process is running

List the size (in human readable form) of all sub folders from the current location
Simple and easy to remember. -h is human, -d1 = depth 1. disk usage, human, depth 1

Use file(1) to view device information
file(1) can print details about certain devices in the /dev/ directory (block devices in this example). This helped me to know at a glance the location and revision of my bootloader, UUIDs, filesystem status, which partitions were primaries / logicals, etc.. without running several commands. See also: $ file -s /dev/dm-* $ file -s /dev/cciss/* etc..

Super Speedy Hexadecimal or Octal Calculations and Conversions to Decimal.
^Hexadecimal Ten minus Octal Ten is Eight(in Decimal). $ echo "$(( 0xaf )) = $(( 0257 ))" ^Hexadecimal AF and Octal 257 are both Decimal 175.

Kill all processes belonging to a user

Define shell variable HISTIGNORE so that comments (lines starting with #) appear in shell history
I was surprised to find that with RedHat bash, I could not find any comment lines (begining with #) in my bash shell history. Surprised because in Mageia Linux this works. It turns out that RedHat's bash will keep comment lines if in my .bashrc, I define: export HISTIGNORE=' cd "`*: PROMPT_COMMAND=?*?' Why have comment lines in shell history? It's a handy and convenient way to make proto-commands (to be completed later) and for storing brief text data that is searchable in shell history.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

Find chronological errors or bad timestamps in a Subversion repository
Lists revisions in a Subversion repository with a timestamp that doesn't follow the revision numbering order. If everything is OK, nothing is displayed.

Find last modified files in a directory and its subdirectories
Goes through all files in the directory specified, uses `stat` to print out last modification time, then sorts numerically in reverse, then uses cut to remove the modified epoch timestamp and finally head to only output the last 10 modified files. Note that on a Mac `stat` won't work like this, you'll need to use either: $ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f '%m%t%Sm %12z %N' | sort -nr | cut -f2- | head or alternatively do a `brew install coreutils` and then replace `stat` with `gstat` in the original command.


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: