Commands for the wicked (112)

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

diff directories, quick cut and paste to view the changes
We use this to quickly highlight differences and provide a quick way to cut and paste the command to view the files using the marvellous vimdiff

Remove duplicate entries in a file without sorting.
Using awk, find duplicates in a file without sorting, which reorders the contents. awk will not reorder them, and still find and remove duplicates which you can then redirect into another file.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

search for text in files. recursive.
recursively search dir for a a particular file type, search each file for a particular text.

preprocess code to be posted in comments on this site
Assuming that $script contains the filename of a script you'd like to post as part of a comment on this site, this will prefix each line with '$' and pipe it into the X selection. From there just put the cursor in the right place in the comments box and middle-click. Should work pretty much anywhere with xclip installed. On debian-ish systems this is installed as part of the package "xclip".

ignore .DS_Store forever in GIT
With a couple of little commands, you?ll be able to ignore the .DS_Store files forever from your git repositories on mac! The following command will add the .gitignore file to the git configuration git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore then, the following, will add the .DS_Store to the list echo .DS_Store >> ~/.gitignore

sort list of email addresses by domain.tld
email random list can be created here: https://www.randomlists.com/email-addresses

intercept stdout/stderr of another process or disowned process
Useful to recover a output(stdout and stderr) "disown"ed or "nohup"ep process of other instance of ssh. With the others options the stdout / stderr is intercepted, but only the first n chars. This way we can recover ALL text of stdout or stderr

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"


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: