Commands by verm666 (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

create an emergency swapfile when the existing swap space is getting tight
Create a temporary file that acts as swap space. In this example it's a 1GB file at the root of the file system. This additional capacity is added to the existing swap space.

Convert all WMF images to SVG recursively ignoring file extension case
This assumes you have the package installed necessary for converting WMF files. On my Ubuntu box, this is libwmf-bin. I used this command, as libwmf is not on my wife's iMac, so I archived the directories containing the WMF files from OS X, ran them on my Ubuntu box, archived the resulting SVGs, and sent them back to her. Quick, simple and to the point. Searches directories recursively looking for extensions ignoring case. This is much more readable and clean than -exec for find. The while loop also gives further flexibility on complex logic. Also, although there is 'wmf2svg --auto', it expects lowercase extensions, and not uppercase. Because I want to ignore case, I need to use the -o option instead. Works in ZSH and BASH. Haven't tested in other shells.

Print diagram of user/groups
Parses /etc/group to "dot" format and pases it to "display" (imagemagick) to show a usefull diagram of users and groups (don't show empty groups).

Stream and copy a video from lan
Requires a listening port on HOST eg. "cat movie.mp4 | nc -l 1356 " (cat movie.mp4 | nc -l PORT) Useful if you're impatient and want to watch a movie immediately and download it at the same time without using extra bandwidth. You can't seek (it'll crash and kill the stream) but you can pause it.

quickly formats a fat partition. usefull for flash drives

urldecoding
My version uses printf and command substitution ($()) instead of echo -e and xargs, this is a few less chars, but not real substantive difference. Also supports lowercase hex letters and a backslash (\) will make it through unescaped

Polkit: Force KDE apps to always recognize your display
KDE apps expect certain variables to be set, and unfortunately pkexec doesn’t set them by default. So, by setting this alias, it becomes possible to run, e.g. “pkexec kate” or “pkexec dolphin” and it’ll actually run.

split and combine different pages from different pdf's
The command shows the real power of the pdftk tool, you can do basically everything you want with multiple pdf's. In the command a book is created from chapters, headings and covers.

open a seperate konsole tab and ssh to each of N servers (konsole 4.2+)
creates a new tab for each of N servers in listofservers.txt and ssh's to said servers then, try the "send to all sessions" feature of konsole to do the same work on all servers at the same time. BIG time saver, but be careful!

Skip to next selection in playlist
Uses process signal to play next selection

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: