Commands by unixmonkey2363 (1)

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

View online pdf documents in cli
Probably will not work very well with scanned documents.

Infinite loop ssh

disk space email alert
put it in crontab to get an alert when / is over 89% utilization.

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (cp does not!; run this command with root!)
cp options: -p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps -r will copy files recursively also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

Redefine the cd command's behavior
Often, the very next command after the cd command is 'ls', so why not combine them?. Tested on a Red Hat derivative and Mac OS X Leopard Update: changed ${1:-$HOME} to "${@:-$HOME}" to accomodate directories with spaces in the names

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Get all IPs via ifconfig
and, a lot uglier, with sed: $ ifconfig | sed -n '/inet addr:/s/[^:]\+:\(\S\+\).*/\1/p' Edit: Wanted to be shorter than the perl version. Still think that the perl version is the best..

Serial console to a Vmware VM
Create a serial console with "socket (named pipe)" of "/tmp/socket", "from:server, to:virtual machine" in vmware player, etc.. gui. Run the above command after you have booted the guest OS (which should also be configured for serial console).

Make ls output better visible on dark terminals in bash
Sometimes you have a situation where you cannot properly see the ls output when you are using a terminal w/a dark background. Usually bash has ls aliased to use colors, and you can easily get ls to use the default foreground color via simply unaliasing the command.

Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage
ps returns all running processes which are then sorted by the 4th field in numerical order and the top 10 are sent to STDOUT.

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: