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 16
  • 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 7
  • 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 7
  • 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 10
  • 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 9
  • 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 5
  • 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 4
  • 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 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

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.

Joins args together using the first arg as glue

Ext3 format Terabytes in Seconds

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

create screencast (record text and audio simultaneously) using 'script' and 'arecord'
This shell function takes a single argument, which is used as the base name of the .wav, .timing and .session files created. To create a screencast: $ screencast test type and talk ... then type 'exit' or to exit the screencast. test.wav will contain the audio from your screencast. test.session will contain text and control characters needed to paint the screen test.timing will contain timing information needed to synch individual keystrokes in test.session with the audio. to play back: $ aplay test.wav & scriptreplay test.{timing,session} NOTE: because the shell function uses the variable "$!", and bash likes to expand '!' during history expansion, you will need to turn off bash's history before you enter the shell function. This can be achieved using the command $set +H

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.

Remove all mail in Postfix mail queue.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Find non-standard files in mysql data directory
These files should be removed to keep the size of data directory under control. If you exclude the known important file types like frm and MYD then what-ever is left can be either moved or deleted.

Create a file of a given size in linux
If you're trying to create a sparse file, you can use dd by 'skip'ing to the last block instance. ls -ls shows the actual size vs. the reported size


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: