Commands by theist (8)

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

Find the date of the first commit in a git repository
Finds the date of the first commit in a git repository branch

Lines per second in a log file

Create and replay macros in vim
You can record, then replay a series of keystrokes in vim. In command mode 'q', then a letter [a-zA-Z] starts macro recording mode. Enter a series of vim commands. When done, enter command mode again, and press 'q' to stop recording. To replay, enter command mode, then press @{letter}

This is how you should push a string in a command's stdin.
Don't do this: $echo word | command Using a bash "here strings" and "here documents" look leeter than piping echo into the command. Also prevents subshell execution. Word is also expanded as usual.

Find the annual salary of any White House staffer.
Query the Socrata Open Data API being used by the White House to find any employee's salary using curl, grep and awk. Change the value of the search parameter (example uses Axelrod) to the name of any White House staffer to see their annual salary.

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"

Use md5sum to check your music and movie files. Also use diff.
This is a beginning script. You can create a file with > filename. You can also use diff to compare output run at different times to verify no change in your files. I apologize in advance if this is too simple. For some it should be a start.

Extract audio track from a video file using mencoder
Extracts an MP3 encoded audio stream from an input video file.

Clean way of re-running bash startup scripts.
This replaces the current bash session with a new bash session, run as an interactive non-login shell... useful if you have changed /etc/bash.bashrc, or ~/.bashrc If you have changed a startup script for login shells, use $ exec bash -l Suitable for re-running /etc/profile, ~/.bash_login and ~/.profile. edit: chinmaya points out that $ env - HOME=$HOME TERM=$TERM bash -s "exec bash -l" will clear any shell variables which have been set... since this verges on unwieldy, might want to use $ alias bash_restart='env - HOME=$HOME TERM=$TERM bash -s "exec bash -l"'

Performance tip: compress /usr/
Periodically run the one-liner above if/when there are significant changes to the files in /usr/ = Before rebooting, add following to /etc/fstab : = $ /squashed/usr/usr.sfs /squashed/usr/ro squashfs loop,ro 0 0 $ usr /usr aufs udba=reval,br:/squashed/usr/rw:/squashed/usr/ro 0 0 No need to delete original /usr/ ! (unless you don't care about recovery). Also AuFS does not work with XFS


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: