Commands by splante (8)

  • Get duration of an audio file in seconds.

    This is an alternative to #9131. ffmpeg didn't work on my .au files, though it did on the .wav ones. Also useful if you don't have ffmpeg but do have sox. Handily, sox already reports in seconds (decimal). Show Sample Output


    3
    get_duration() { durline=$(sox "$1" -n stat 2>&1|grep "Length (seconds):");echo ${durline#*\: }; }
    splante · 2011-09-02 15:22:43 5
  • Synchronize date and time with a server over ssh

    Shorter, easier to remember version of cmd#7636 NTP is better, but there are situations where it can't be used. In those cases, you can do this to sync the local time to a server. Show Sample Output


    39
    date --set="$(ssh user@server date)"
    splante · 2011-08-30 20:03:06 62
  • Find out current working directory of a process

    This is an alternative to another command using two xargs. If it's a command you know there's only one of, you can just use: ls -l /proc/$(pgrep COMMAND)/cwd Show Sample Output


    3
    eval ls -l /proc/{$(pgrep -d, COMMAND)}/cwd
    splante · 2011-04-14 13:41:58 7
  • lazy SQL QUERYING

    This is regarding the command 8263 using an alias to fill in command line options for psql. You can actually just type 'psql'. In order for that to work, you want to set environment variables PGDATABASE, PGHOST, PGUSER, and (except you're using the default) PGPORT. Also, you can add a line "host:port:dbname:user:password" (asterisk ok in some columns) to your ~/.pgpass file. Finally, if you don't like the aligned columns, you can add the line "\pset format unaligned" to your ~/.psqlrc file.


    2
    psql
    splante · 2011-04-08 18:35:20 5
  • Remote screenshot

    Admittedly, I'd never have thought of this without the earlier examples, but here's one that you can execute from your workstation to just display the image from another, without separately doing a file transfer, etc. By the way, I hear a loud beep coming from the other room, so I guess it's not too stealthy :-D


    12
    ssh user@remote-host "DISPLAY=:0.0 import -window root -format png -"|display -format png -
    splante · 2011-04-08 01:07:41 5
  • Adds "-c" canonical option to bash "type" builtin command to follow symbolic links

    The "type" builtin command is handy to find out what executable will be used if you issue a command. But on some distros, particularly when using /etc/alternatives, certain executables get buried under layers and layers of symbolic links and it becomes hard to find which one. If you put the above command in your .bashrc, it adds a "-c" option to the type command that will weed through the symbolic links and prints the actual file that will be executed. Show Sample Output


    0
    type () { if [ "$1" = "-c" ]; then shift; for f in "$@"; do ff=$(builtin type -p "$f"); readlink -f "$ff"; done; else builtin type $typeopts "$@"; fi; }
    splante · 2011-04-07 18:57:51 5
  • List the size (in human readable form) of all sub folders from the current location

    Credit goes to brun65i but he posted it as a comment instead as an alternative. I hadn't noticed the -h option on sort before and this seems like the cleanest alternative. Thanks Brun65i! Show Sample Output


    0
    du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -hr
    splante · 2011-04-07 18:01:18 3
  • cd to (or operate on) a file across parallel directories

    ksh's version of cd has an optional syntax where you can type "cd old new" and it will replace "old" with "new" in your current directory and take you there. This is very handy when you have a parallel directory structure, like source and object directories. As suggested, you can just type cd ${PWD/old/new} to get this in bash, but this function in your .bashrc will let you type the ksh cd syntax and avoid typing the special characters while preserving other cd functionality. Show Sample Output


    0
    cd () { cdop=""; while [ "$1" != "${1#-}" ]; do cdop="${cdop} ${1}"; shift; done; if [ $# -eq 2 ]; then newdir="${PWD/$1/$2}"; [ -d "${newdir}" ] || { echo "no ${newdir}"; return 1; }; builtin cd $cdop "${newdir}"; else builtin cd $cdop "$@"; fi }
    splante · 2011-04-07 14:36:26 3

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Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Let's make screen and ssh-agent friends
When you start screen as `ssh-agent screen`, agent will die after detatch. If you don't want to take care about files when stored agent's pid/socket/etc, you have to use this command.

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"

Find the package that installed a command

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Get the size of all the directories in current directory (Sorted Human Readable)
This allows the output to be sorted from largest to smallest in human readable format.

Remove spaces from filenames - through a whole directory tree.
An example of zsh glob qualifiers.

Recursively grep for string and format output for vi(m)
This is a big time saver for me. I often grep source code and need to edit the findings. A single highlight of the mouse and middle mouse click (in gnome terminal) and I'm editing the exact line I just found. The color highlighting helps interpret the data.

Unite pdf files
pdfunite is a part of the poppler-utils. poppler-utils package is only 150KB. The alternative - pdftk package is 14MB! Install poppler-utils if you need simple pdf operation commands like unite, separate, info, text/html conversions

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