Commands by polaco (6)

  • This is a very simple and lightweight way to play DI.FM stations For a more complete version of the command with proper strings in the menu, try: (couldnt fit in the command field above) zenity --list --width 500 --height 500 --title 'DI.FM' --text 'Pick a Radio' --column 'radio' --column 'url' --print-column 2 $(curl -s http://www.di.fm/ | awk -F '"' '/href="http:.*\.pls.*96k/ {print $2}' | sort | awk -F '/|\.' '{print $(NF-1) " " $0}') | xargs mplayer This command line parses the html returned from http://di.fm and display all radio stations in a nice graphical menu. After the radio is chosen, the url is passed to mplayer so the music can start dependencies: - x11 with gtk environment - zenity: simple app for displaying gtk menus (sudo apt-get install zenity on ubuntu) - mplayer: simple audio player (sudo apt-get install mplayer on ubuntu) Show Sample Output


    16
    zenity --list --width 500 --height 500 --column 'radio' --column 'url' --print-column 2 $(curl -s http://www.di.fm/ | awk -F '"' '/href="http:.*\.pls.*96k/ {print $2}' | sort | awk -F '/|\.' '{print $(NF-1) " " $0}') | xargs mplayer
    polaco · 2010-04-28 23:45:35 2
  • Merge files, joining line by line horizontally. Very useful when you have a lot of files where each line represents an info about an event and you want to join them into a single file where each line has all the info about the same event See the example for a better understanding Show Sample Output


    3
    paste file1 file2 fileN > merged
    polaco · 2010-03-12 16:34:48 1
  • The above code is just an example of printing on the same line, hit Ctrl + C to stop When using echo -ne "something\r", echo will: - print "something" - dont print a new line (-n) - interpret \r as carriage return, going back to the start of the line (-e) Remember to print some white spaces after the output if your command will print lines of different sizes, mainly if one line will be smaller than the previous Edit from reading comments: You can achieve the same effect using printf (more standardized than echo): while true; do printf "%-80s\r" "$(date)"; sleep 1; done


    12
    while true; do echo -ne "$(date)\r"; sleep 1; done
    polaco · 2009-11-17 22:45:37 4
  • This script creates date based backups of the files. It copies the files to the same place the original ones are but with an additional extension that is the timestamp of the copy on the following format: YearMonthDay-HourMinuteSecond Show Sample Output


    6
    backup() { for i in "$@"; do cp -va $i $i.$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S); done }
    polaco · 2009-11-10 20:59:45 2
  • This script will list all the files in the tarballs present on any folder or subfolder of the provided path. The while loop is for echoing the file name of the tarball before listing the files, so the tarball can be identified


    -2
    find <path> -name "*.tgz" -or -name "*.tar.gz" | while read file; do echo "$file: "; tar -tzf $file; done
    polaco · 2009-11-10 20:39:04 3
  • This command will copy a folder tree (keeping the parent folders) through ssh. It will: - compress the data - stream the compressed data through ssh - decompress the data on the local folder This command will take no additional space on the host machine (no need to create compressed tar files, transfer it and then delete it on the host). There is some situations (like mirroring a remote machine) where you simply cant wait for a huge time taking scp command or cant compress the data to a tarball on the host because of file system space limitation, so this command can do the job quite well. This command performs very well mainly when a lot of data is involved in the process. If you copying a low amount of data, use scp instead (easier to type) Show Sample Output


    12
    ssh <host> 'tar -cz /<folder>/<subfolder>' | tar -xvz
    polaco · 2009-11-10 20:06:47 4

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

Make a thumbnail image of first page of a PDF.
convert is included in ImageMagick. Don't forget the [X] (where X is the page number). [0] is the first page of the PDF.

Update Ogg Vorbis file comments
The "vorbiscomment" utility lets you update information such as artist names and song and album tags in an Ogg Vorbis file. You can use this command to fix any mistakes that were made when ripping an album.

Show current working directory of a process

Show complete URL in netstat output
The -W switch of netstat makes it print complete URL of the connections, which otherwise by default is truncated to fit its default column size. Now to compensate for irregular column sizes, pipe the output to column (-t switch of column prints in tabular form). The only downside to this part is that the very first row, the header, goes pear shape.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

mean color of an image
You can get the mean value for the colours in an image. Then you can determine, in general, how dark or bright is the image and run some other actions based on that. I'll recommend to readjust the brightness of the images using +sigmoidal-contrast option of imagemagick convert command.

geoip information
That makes a function you can put in your ~/.bashrc to run it when you need in any term with an IP as argument

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

List upcoming events on google calendar
Requires googlecl (http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/) Even better when you wrap this in a script and allow the --date=STRING to be $1. Then you can type: whatson "next Thursday" The date string for UNIX date is very flexible. You can also add --cal "[regex]" to the end for multiple calendars.

Retrieve the size of a file on a server
- Where $URL is the URL of the file. - Replace the $2 by $3 at the end to get a human-readable size. Credits to svanberg @ ArchLinux forums for original idea. Edit: Replaced command with better version by FRUiT. (removed unnecessary grep)


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: