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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Split a tarball into multiple parts
Create a tar file in multiple parts if it's to large for a single disk, your filesystem, etc. Rejoin later with `cat .tar.*|tar xf -`

Find the biggest files on your hard drive

A simple way to securely use passwords on the command line or in scripts
In this example, where the users gpg keyring has a password, the user will be interactively prompted for the keyring password. If the keyring has no password, same as above, sans the prompt. Suitable for cron jobs. ~/.gnupg/passwd/http-auth.gpg is the encrypted http auth password, for this particular wget use case. This approach has many use cases. example bash functions: function http_auth_pass() { gpg2 --decrypt ~/.gnupg/passwd/http-auth.gpg 2>/dev/null; } function decrypt_pass() { gpg2 --decrypt ~/.gnupg/passwd/"$1" 2>/dev/null; }

Run the built in PHP-server in current folder
You must have PHP 5.4.0 or later to be able to run the built in server. This web server is designed for developmental purposes only, and should not be used in production. URI requests are served from the current working directory where PHP was started, unless the -t option is used to specify an explicit document root. If a URI request does not specify a file, then either index.php or index.html in the given directory are returned. If neither file exists, then a 404 response code is returned. If a PHP file is given on the command line when the web server is started it is treated as a "router" script. The script is run at the start of each HTTP request. If this script returns FALSE, then the requested resource is returned as-is. Otherwise the script's output is returned to the browser. Standard MIME types are returned for files with extensions: .css, .gif, .htm, .html, .jpe, .jpeg, .jpg, .js, .png, .svg, and .txt. The .htm and .svg extensions are recognized from PHP 5.4.4 onwards. More information here: http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver.php

check open ports without netstat or lsof

dd with progress bar and statistics
Uses the pv utility to show progress of data transfer and an ETA until completion. You can install pv via Homebrew on macOS

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"

Detect if we are running on a VMware virtual machine
If you run this command on a VMWare Virtual Machine, it will return the string "VMware Virtual Platform". If you run it on a physical machine, it will return nothing. Useful for having a script determine if it's running on a VM or not. Of course, you must have dmidecode installed for this to work. Try it this way in a script: ISVM=$(dmidecode | awk '/VMware Virtual Platform/ {print $3,$4,$5}') Then test if $ISVM has text in it, or is blank.

Bash logger

List only executables installed by a debian package
I wanted to view only executables installed by a package. This seemed to work. There's got to be easier way, please share. Note: (1) Replace iptables with the package name of your interest (2) The command will trash any existing environment variable named 'lst' (3) Instead if you are interested in viewing just .ko or .so files installed by this package, then that would be easy: $ dpkg -L iptables | grep "\.[sk]o$"


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