Commands by xxjcaxx (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

Generate random valid mac addresses
Doubt it actually generates valid mac addresses but this version doesn't need any external commands so it runs much faster. Much shorter as well.

How to run a command on a list of remote servers read from a file
The important thing to note in this command, is the "-n" flag.

Rename files in batch

Sort files in folders alphabetically
Creates one letter folders in the current directory and moves files with corresponding initial in the folder.

convert single digit to double digits
Uses 'rename' to pad zeros in front of first existing number in each filename. The "--" is not required, but it will prevent errors on filenames which start with "-". You can change the "2d" to any number you want, equaling the total numeric output: aka, 4d = ????, 8d = ????????, etc. I setup a handful of handy functions to this effect (because I couldn't figure out how to insert a var for the value) in the form of 'padnum?', such as: padnum5 () { /usr/bin/rename 's/\d+/sprintf("%05d",$&)/e' -- $@ } Which would change a file "foo-1.txt" to "foo-00001.txt"

Uncompress a CSS file
Ever compress a file for the web by replacing all newline characters with nothing so it makes one nice big blob? It is a great idea, however what about when you want to edit that file? ...Serious pain in the butt. I ran into this today in that my only copy of a CSS file was "compressed" with no newlines. I whipped this up and it converted back into nice human readable CSS :-) It could be nicer, but it does the job.

Create a favicon
Create a favicon suitable for use on your web site. Note: ppmtowinicon is part of libpbm, not ImageMagick.

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 !!).

Waste time for about 3 minutes
If you're a slow reader and/or you like to ponder, adjust the sleep time to be longer

Alternative for basename using grep to extract file name
Here's a bash version.


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: