Commands by sonic (8)

  • From the manpage: man less -X or --no-init Disables sending the termcap initialization and deinitialization strings to the terminal. This is sometimes desirable if the deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like clearing the screen. Bonus: If you want to clear the screen after viewing a file this way that had sensitive information, hit or just type clear. Since is readily available, I don't know why less bothers to automatically clear. If you're viewing the file at all, chances are you want to see the output from it after you quit. Show Sample Output


    2
    less -X /var/log/insecure
    sonic · 2016-06-24 13:53:49 3
  • The original command is great, but I often want to prepend to every line. Show Sample Output


    2
    sed -i 's/^/ls -l /' output_files.txt
    sonic · 2013-10-07 15:12:53 0
  • Prints line numbers making it easier to see long lines that wrap in your terminal and extra line breaks at the end of a file. :set nu works too. Show Sample Output


    0
    :set number
    sonic · 2013-10-07 15:03:52 0
  • If /home/sonic/archive/ was a symlink to /backup/sonic/archive it would follow the links and give you the file listing. By default find will NOT follow symbolic links. The default behavior for the find command is to treat the symlinks as literal files. I discovered this when trying to write a script run via cron to delete files with a modification time older than X days. The easiest solution was to use: /usr/bin/find -L /home/sonic/archive -name '*gz' -type f -mtime +14 -exec rm '{}' \; Show Sample Output


    -1
    find -L /home/sonic/archive -name '*gz' -type f
    sonic · 2013-10-07 14:32:22 0
  • the advantage to doing it this way is that you can adjust the max depth to get more recursive results and run it on non GNU systems. It also won't print trailing slashes, which can easily be removed, but can be slightly annoying.. You could run: # for file in `find * -maxdepth 0 -type d`;do ls -d $file;done and in the ls -d part of the command you can put in whatever parameters you want to get things like permissions, time stamps, and ownership. Show Sample Output


    0
    find * -maxdepth 0 -type d
    sonic · 2013-02-25 21:10:49 1
  • just an alternative to setting the size, this allows you to scroll up and see your previous commands in a given session but when you logout the history is not saved. That's the only advantage to doing it this way.. Show Sample Output


    0
    export HISTFILE=/dev/null
    sonic · 2013-02-18 16:37:01 0
  • To ignore aspect ratio, run: for file in *; do convert $file -resize 800x600! resized-$file; done and all images will be exactly 800x600. Use your shell of choice.. This was done in BASH. Show Sample Output


    0
    for file in *; do convert $file -resize 800x600 resized-$file; done
    sonic · 2013-02-17 21:37:14 0
  • I couldn't find this on the site and it's a useful switch. Great for large files. Show Sample Output


    2
    wget -c or wget --continue
    sonic · 2013-02-17 21:12:00 0

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Copy sparse files
This causes cp to detect and omit large blocks of nulls. Sparse files are useful for implying a lot of disk space without actually having to write it all out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file You can use it in a pipe too: $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=5 |cp --sparse=always /dev/stdin SPARSE_FILE

Randomize lines (opposite of | sort)
random(6) - random lines from a file or random numbers

Get count of kilobytes brew cleanup would free

Display rows and columns of random numbers with awk
Displays six rows and five columns of random numbers between 0 and 1. If you need only one column, you can dispense with the "for" loop.

Alternative way to generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password usig sed
This is what I came up to generate XKCD #936 style four-word password. Since first letter of every word is capitalized it looks a bit more readable to my eyes. Also strips single quotes. And yes - regex is a bit of a kludge, but that's the bes i could think of.

Print a date from 3 days ago
This command prints the Date (Not time) from 3 days ago (72 hours ago). This works on systems without GNU date (MacOSX , Solaris, FreeBSD).

Upload a video to youtube
Google just released a new commend line tool offering all sorts of new services from the commend line. One of them is uploading a youtube video but there are plenty more google services to interact with. Download it here: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/ Manual: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/wiki/Manual

Generate random valid mac addresses
Shorter and more straightforward. Also in perl: $ perl -e 'print join(":", map { sprintf "%0.2X",rand(256) }(1..6))."\n"'

Get your external IP address with a random commandlinefu.com command
There's been so many ways submitted to get your external IP address that I decided we all need a command that will just go pick a random one from the list and run it. This gets a list of "Get your external IP" commands from commanlinefu.com and selects a random one to run. It will run the command and print out which command it used. This is not a serious entry, but it was a learning exercise for me writing it. My personal favourite is "curl icanhazip.com". I really don't think we need any other ways to do this, but if more come you can make use of them with this command ;o). Here's a more useful command that always gets the top voted "External IP" command, but it's not so much fun: $ eval $(curl -s http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/external/ZXh0ZXJuYWw=/sort-by-votes/plaintext|sed -n '/^# Get your external IP address$/{n;p;q}')

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.


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