Commands by postrational (5)

  • Use this BASH trick to create a variable containing the TAB character and pass it as the argument to sort, join, cut and other commands which don't understand the \t notation. sort -t $'\t' ... join -t $'\t' ... cut -d $'\t' ... Show Sample Output


    5
    sort -t $'\t' -k 2 input.txt
    postrational · 2010-07-11 12:58:51 0
  • There is a common command for outputting a field or list of fields from each line in a file. Why wouldn't you just use cut?


    4
    cut -f 1 three-column.txt > first-column.txt
    postrational · 2010-07-11 10:13:45 1
  • Performs a reverse DNS lookup, variants include: nslookup 74.125.45.100 or: host 74.125.45.100 Show Sample Output


    4
    dig -x 74.125.45.100
    postrational · 2009-09-28 15:13:34 0
  • Date-time format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS Show Sample Output


    7
    export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
    postrational · 2009-09-26 17:13:23 0
  • Checks the Gmail ATOM feed for your account, parses it and outputs a list of unread messages. For some reason sed gets stuck on OS X, so here's a Perl version for the Mac: curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '<entry>' '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {print $i}}' | perl -pe 's/^<title>(.*)<\/title>.*<name>(.*)<\/name>.*$/$2 - $1/' If you want to see the name of the last person, who added a message to the conversation, change the greediness of the operators like this: curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '<entry>' '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {print $i}}' | perl -pe 's/^<title>(.*)<\/title>.*?<name>(.*?)<\/name>.*$/$2 - $1/' Show Sample Output


    47
    curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '<entry>' '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) {print $i}}' | sed -n "s/<title>\(.*\)<\/title.*name>\(.*\)<\/name>.*/\2 - \1/p"
    postrational · 2009-09-07 21:56:40 6

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Sum size of files returned from FIND

find text in a file
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Remove color codes (special characters) with sed
Works great on Mac OSX.

Runs previous command replacing foo by bar every time that foo appears
Very useful for rerunning a long command changing some arguments globally. As opposed to ^foo^bar, which only replaces the first occurrence of foo, this one changes every occurrence.

Find and copy scattered mp3 files into one directory
I used this command to recursively gather all mp3 files that were previously imported into their own directories (sorted by band name) in Songbird.

Show word-by-word differences between two latex files, in color

Recover resolution when a fullscreen program crashes and you're stuck with a tiny X resolution
This forces X back to its maximum resolution configured. To get a list, type `xrandr'.

capture selected window

uncomment the lines where the word DEBUG is found

Go to the Nth line of file


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