Commands by unixmonkey3987 (3)

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

type partial command, kill this command, check something you forgot, yank the command, resume typing.
Example : $ vim /etc/fstab ## damn $ $ sudo ## like a boss. Example 2 : $ sudo vim /root/bin/ ##uh... autocomplete doesn't work... $ $ sudo ls /root/bin ##ah! that's the name of the file! $ sudo vim /root/bin/ ##resume here! Thanks readline!

Run skype using your GTK theme
I use this to make skype blend better into my desktop :) --disable-cleanlooks might not be nescessary to achieve the wanted effect.

Check if a command is available in your system
Usefull to detect if a commad that your script relies upon is properly installed in your box, you can use it as a function function is_program_installed() { type "$1" >/dev/null } Invoke it and check the execution code is_program_installed "dialog" if [ ! $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "dialog is not installed" exit 1 fi

reverse order of file

Crash bash, in case you ever want to for whatever reason
This is a very hackish way to do it that I'm mainly just posting for fun, and I guess technically can more accurately be said to result in undefined behavior. What the command does is tell the shell to treat libpng like it's a shell plugin (which it's most certainly not) and attempt to install a "png_create_read" command from the library. It looks for the struct with the information about the command; since it's always the command name followed by "_struct", it'll look for a symbol called "png_create_read_struct". And it finds it, since this is the name of one of libpng's functions. But bash has no way to tell it's a function instead of a struct, so it goes ahead and parses the function's code as if it was command metadata. Inevitably, bash will attempt to dereference an invalid pointer or whatever, resulting in a segfault.

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

Use top to monitor only all processes with the same name fragment 'foo'
top accecpts a comma separated list of PIDs.

Console clock
Shows a simple clock in the console -t param removes the watch header Ctrl-c to exit

Replace Solaris vmstat numbers with human readable format
% cat ph-vmstat.awk # Return human readable numbers function hrnum(a) { b = a ; if (a > 1000000) { b = sprintf("%2.2fM", a/1000000) ; } else if (a > 1000) { b = sprintf("%2.2fK", a/1000) ; } return(b) ; } # Return human readable storage function hrstorage(a) { b = a ; if (a > 1024000) { b = sprintf("%2.2fG", a/1024/1024) ; } else if (a > 1024) { b = sprintf("%2.2fM", a/1024) ; } return(b) ; } OFS=" " ; $1 !~ /[0-9].*/ {print} $1 ~ /[0-9].*/ { $4 = hrstorage($4) ; $5 = hrstorage($5) ; $9 = hrnum($9) ; $10 = hrnum($10) ; $17 = hrnum($17) ; $18 = hrnum($18) ; $19 = hrnum($19) ; print ; }

Get length of current playlist in xmms2

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: