Commands by unixmonkey40000 (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

Place the NUM-th argument of the most recent command on the shell
After executing a command with multiple arguments like cp ./temp/test.sh ~/prog/ifdown.sh you can paste any argument of the previous command to the console, like ls -l ALT+1+. is equivalent to ls -l ./temp/test.sh ALT+0+. stands for command itself ('ls' in this case) Simple ALT+. cycles through last arguments of previous commands.

Start another instance of X via SSH

See udev at work
See how your system works with pendrives/mice/monitors/whatever-you-can-plug-in. Use cases: see on which /dev/... your peripherals are, find out if a specific udev rule is being applied correctly.

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

list files recursively by size

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
This version uses netcat to check a particular service.

Colorize svn stat
Use color escape sequences and sed to colorize the output of svn stat -u. Colors: http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/colorizing.html svn stat characters: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn-book.html#svn.ref.svn.c.status GNU Extensions for Escapes in Regular Expressions: http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/Escapes.html

I finally found out how to use notify-send with at or cron
The simplest way to do it. Works for me, at least. (Why are the variables being set?)

export iPad App list to txt file
This will generate the same output without changing the current directory, and filepath will be relative to the current directory. Note: it will (still) fail if your iTunes library is in a non-standard location.

Change user, assume environment, stay in current dir
I've used this a number of times troubleshooting user permissions. Instead of just 'su - user' you can throw another hyphen and stay in the original directory.

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: