Commands by saps (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

Create an alias, store it in ~/.bash_aliases and source your new alias into the ~/.bashrc
This is useful if you use a shell with a lot of other users. You will be able to run "topu" to see your running processes instead of the complete 'top -u username'. Read more on alias: http://man.cx/alias

Find the package that installed a command

Define words and phrases with google.
This function takes a word or a phrase as arguments and then fetches definitions using Google's "define" syntax. The "nl" and perl portion isn't strictly necessary. It just makes the output a bit more readable, but this also works: $define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Po '(?/dev/null;}

count processes with status "D" uninterruptible sleep

Delete all git branches except master
Delete all your branches except master (useful after archiving branches)

Display two calendar months side by side
Displays last month, current month, and next month side by side.

put command in a loop to keep trying a connection
This will keep trying to reconnect your netcat connection can be used with SSH or Telnet, just substitute nc for ssh or telnet very useful for troubleshooting VPNs were you want to send continuous packets towards a destination to trace.

Oneliner to run commands on multiple servers
Oneliner to run commands on multiple servers over ssh. - First parameter "$1" is the command you want to execute remotely. ( It can be multiple commands e.g. "hostname;uptime") - Second parameter "${@:2}" represents the remote host/s you want to run the command/s on.

Enable color pattern match highlighting in grep(1)
This will affect all invocations of grep, even when it is called from inside a script.

Change the From: address on the fly for email sent from the command-line
It's very common to have cron jobs that send emails as their output, but the From: address is whatever account the cron job is running under, which is often not the address you want replies to go to. Here's a way to change the From: address right on the command line. What's happening here is that the "--" separates the options to the mail client from options for the sendmail backend. So the -f and -F get passed through to sendmail and interpreted there. This works on even on a system where postfix is the active mailer - looks like postfix supports the same options. I think it's possible to customize the From: address using mutt as a command line mailer also, but most servers don't have mutt preinstalled.

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: