Commands by pillo (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

draw mesh

Watch command
Repeat command after every 2 secs

Open Perl module source in your editor
Ever needed to look at the Perl source of an installed module on your system? This works in 90% of cases.

Matrix Style
I like the fact the Patola's version uses only ones and zeros, but I also like the sparse output of the other versions. This one combines both of those features and eliminates some unnecessary cruft. You can vary the sparseness by changing "$(($RANDOM % 5))" to another number. The number in this term "$(($RANDOM % 4))" controls how frequently the numbers are output bold.

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Ruby - nslookup against a list of IP`s or FQDN`s
This version uses host and no ruby.

Create a file of repeated, non-zero
dd can be used with /dev/zero to easily create a file of all zero-bytes. Pipe that through tr and use octal conversions to change the byte values from zero to 0xff (octal 0377). You can replace 0377 with the byte of your choice. You can also use \\0 and \\377 instead of the quoted version.

Count opening and closing braces in a string.
This function counts the opening and closing braces in a string. This is useful if you have eg long boolean expressions with many braces and you simply want to check if you didn't forget to close one.

Create a backup of file being edited while using vi
At the start of a vi session and *before* saving any changes use ":!cp % %-" to make a backup of the current file being edited. example: vi /data/some/long/path/file :!cp% %- creates /data/some/long/path/file-

Rename files in batch

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: