Commands by relay (3)

  • # newline to space; the whack before dollar-underbar is required alias nl2space="perl -ne 'push @F, \$_; END { chomp @F; print join(qq{ }, @F) , qq{\n};}' " # newline to comma; the whack before dollar-underbar is required alias nl2,="perl -ne 'push @F, \$_; END { chomp @F; print join(qq{,}, @F) , qq{\n};}' " PROMPT> cat /tmp/foo foo-001 foo-002 foo-003 foo-004 foo-005 foo-006 foo-007 foo-008 foo-009 foo-010 # 'tr' does not give a newline after it run. Makes a messy commandline. PROMPT> cat /tmp/foo|tr "\n" ' ' foo-001 foo-002 foo-003 foo-004 foo-005 foo-006 foo-007 foo-008 foo-009 foo-010 $PROMPT> tr "\n" ' ' /tmp/foo # 'tr' does not take arguements PROMPT> tr "\n" ' ' /tmp/foo tr: extra operand `/tmp/foo' Try `tr --help' for more information. # 'nl2space' is a filter and takes arguements, adds a newline after it runs. PROMPT> cat /tmp/foo| nl2space foo-001 foo-002 foo-003 foo-004 foo-005 foo-006 foo-007 foo-008 foo-009 foo-010 PROMPT> nl2space /tmp/foo foo-001 foo-002 foo-003 foo-004 foo-005 foo-006 foo-007 foo-008 foo-009 foo-010


    0
    alias nl2space="perl -ne 'push @F, \$_; END { chomp @F; print join(qq{ }, @F) , qq{\n};}' "
    relay · 2009-10-01 02:22:23 3
  • checkfor: have the shell check anything you're waiting for. 'while : ; do' is an infinite loop '$*' executes the command passed in 'sleep 5' - change for your tastes, sleep for 5 seconds bash, ksh, likely sh, maybe zsh Ctrl-c to break the loop Show Sample Output


    1
    function checkfor () { while :; do $*; sleep 5; done; }
    relay · 2009-09-03 19:35:42 1
  • fcd : file change directory A bash function that takes a fully qualified file path and cd's into the directory where it lives. Useful on the commadline when you have a file name in a variable and you'd like to cd to the directory to RCS check it in or look at other files associated with it. Will run on any ksh, bash, likely sh, maybe zsh. Show Sample Output


    1
    function fcd () { [ -f $1 ] && { cd $(dirname $1); } || { cd $1 ; } pwd }
    relay · 2009-09-03 18:58:13 0

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

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

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs
Simply change the years listed in the first seq, and it will print out all the months in that span of years that have Friday the 13ths in them.

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: