Commands using cat sorted by votes

Commands using cat (514)

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Automatd ssh public key setup without ssh-copy-id

Some servers don't have ssh-copy-id, this works in those cases. It will ask for the destination server, this can be IP, hostname, or user@hostname if different from current user. Ssh keygen will let you know if a pubkey already exists on your system and you can opt to not overwrite it.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

echo 'Host or User@Host?:'; read newserver && ssh-keygen -N "" -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa ; ssh $newserver cat <~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ">>" ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ; ssh $newserver

alf · 2010-05-07 06:24:53 4
count how many cat processes are running
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ps -a |grep cat |wc -l

schmiddim · 2010-09-22 23:57:19 3
List your MACs address
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

cat `ls -r /sys/class/net/*/address` | sort -u

jaimerosario · 2011-06-02 23:16:37 3
Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password

The first grep rejects capitalised words since the dict has proper nouns in it that you mightn't want to use. The second grep rejects words with ending in apostrophe s, and the third forces the words to be at least 15 characters long. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
counterproductive unreasonableness multimillionaires extemporaneously
```
-2

cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -P ^[a-z].* | grep -v "'s$" | grep -Pv ^.\{1,15\}$ | shuf -n4 | tr '\n' ' ' | sed 's/$/\n/'

bugmenot · 2011-08-15 01:03:48 6
Cat files in a directory; for loop command

The better alternative to #9756. I don't think I'd ever use the original command, but this one was so bad I had to post this. Sorry. 1. $(ls) is dumb, and will give errors if you have an alias like "ls -Fs" 2. clear is better and more portable than reset state. 3. if you're interested in differences, then use diff, not cat.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for f in *; do clear; cat $f; sleep .3; done

toddkaufmann · 2011-11-25 17:10:47 6
Cat files in a directory; for loop command

Original submitted version would break if any filenames had whitespaces in them. The command is a Bad Idea anyhow, because you will end up `cat`ing a binary or something else specacularly bad.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

for file in ./*; do cat "$file"; sleep 0.3

DopeGhoti · 2011-11-28 20:10:57 3
View external IP
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

wget -q ip.nu && cat index.html

VictorBjelkholm · 2012-03-23 03:14:37 3
Copy paste contents quickly and save as a file

Write script or commands in notepad/Editplus/MS word etc, copy the contents, type the above command and click on enter now, paste by right click-ing the mouse. Entire contents in the clip-board gets pasted now again click on Enter to go to new line/next line. Press Ctrl+D to close/save the file. Not always required to vi to create a new file.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

cat > file_name

michaelrozar17 · 2012-03-27 11:38:09 4
download a list of urls
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

cat urls.txt | xargs -n1 curl -O --max-time 10 --retry 3 --retry-delay 1

kev · 2012-05-14 06:38:06 4
How to execute and encrypted and password-protected bash script?

echo "ls" > script.bash; This is my script, a simple 'ls'. gpg -c script.bash; Here I encrypt and passord-protect my script. This creates file script.bash.gpg. cat script.bash.gpg | gpg -d --no-mdc-warning | bash Here I open file script.bash.gpg, decrypt it and execute it.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

echo "ls" > script.bash; gpg -c script.bash; cat script.bash.gpg | gpg -d --no-mdc-warning | bash

betsubetsu · 2013-03-10 09:34:12 9
List all password hashes
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

cat /etc/shadow

dsetton · 2014-02-01 19:48:05 6
having root on server, add user's public key to his keys (no password required)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

cat user_public_key.pub | ssh root@<host> "cat | su -c 'mkdir -m 700 -p ~/.ssh && cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys && chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys' <user>"

noisy · 2016-05-09 08:48:40 14
small CPU benchmark with PI, bc and time.

Broken in two parts, first get the number of cores with cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep proc|wc -l and create a integer sequence with that number (xargs seq), then have GNU parallel loop that many times over the given command. Cheers! Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
...
66983895228684783123552658213144957685726243344189303968642624341077\
3226978028073189154411010446823252716201052652272111660396

real	0m31,847s
user	0m59,085s
sys	0m0,151s
```
-2

time cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep proc|wc -l|xargs seq|parallel -N 0 echo "scale=4000\; a$1$\*4" '|' bc -l

kostis · 2018-12-06 05:15:24 674
Generrate Cryptographically Secure RANDOM PASSWORD

Change :alnum: to :graph: for all printable characters Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
FH170AB1DXb4dHlX
```
-2

cat /dev/urandom |tr -c -d '[:alnum:]'|head -c 16;echo

AndrewM · 2019-06-17 17:51:04 36
Broadcast message to all logged in terminal users.

Show message in file "welcome" to all logged in terminal users. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
Broadcast Message from william@linux-wsue                                      
        (/dev/pts/0) at 12:05 ...                                              
                                                                               
Welcome to Command-line-fu
```
-3

cat welcome | wall

Williebee · 2009-02-14 18:12:50 12
Eliminate duplicate lines on a file
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

cat file1.txt | uniq > file2.txt

olafrv · 2009-03-01 05:10:10 11
Reset scrambled screen

^V means CTRL-V [ENTER] means ENTER key
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

cat [ENTER]^V^O[ENTER]^D

minliu2k · 2009-04-17 13:16:56 13
View SuSE version

Displays SuSE release information Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 (x86_64)
VERSION = 9
PATCHLEVEL = 4
```
-3

cat /etc/SuSE-release

sharfah · 2009-05-20 17:28:12 20
CPU model
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

cat /proc/cpuinfo

theIndianMaiden · 2009-08-19 11:09:17 13
Get a text on a position on the file and store in a variable with a specific separator
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

TIMEUNIT=$( cat a | grep -n "timescale" | awk -F ":" '{ print $1 } ' )

conradojr · 2009-10-27 18:01:26 3
Get your external IP address

bash neto..
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

exec 3<>/dev/tcp/whatismyip.com/80; echo -e "GET /automation/n09230945.asp HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: whatismyip.com\r\n" >&3; a=( $(cat <&3) ); echo ${a[${#a[*]}-1]};

yaccovs · 2009-11-03 21:57:00 6
Pipe music over netcat with mpg123

I think I picked this one up from Hak5 (yeah I know.. kinda lame)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

#Client# cat "The Meters - People Say.mp3" | nc -vv 192.168.1.100 8080; #Server# nc -vv -l -s 192.168.1.100 -p 8080 | mpg123 -v -

Abiden · 2010-01-30 08:50:17 7
Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable

Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          charged
present rate:            0 mA
remaining capacity:      2000 mAh
present voltage:         16566 mV
```
-3

cat /proc/acpi/battery/*/state

adrruiz · 2010-06-13 23:00:54 4
Replace tabs with spaces in file

Replaces tabs in output with spaces. Uses perl since sed seems to work differently across platforms.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

cat file_with_tabs.txt | perl -pe 's/\t/ /g'

nikc · 2010-07-11 13:01:22 37
close stderr
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

cat aaaaaa 2>&-

totti · 2011-09-14 20:55:26 3
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Look up a unicode character by name

[Update! Thanks to a tip from ioggstream, I've fixed both of the bugs mentioned below.] You, yes, 𝙔𝙊𝙐, can be the terror of the Internet! Why use normal, boring bullet points in your text, when you could use a ROTATED HEAVY BLACK HEART BULLET (❥)!? (Which would also be an awesome band name, by the way). This script makes it easy to find unusual characters from the command line. You can then cut and paste them or, if you're using a GTK application, type Control+Shift+U followed by the code point number (e.g., 2765) and then a SPACE. USAGE: Put this script in a file (I called mine "ugrep") and make it executable. Run it from the command line like so, $ ugrep heart The output will look like this, ☙ U+2619 REVERSED ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET ♡ U+2661 WHITE HEART SUIT ♥ U+2665 BLACK HEART SUIT ❣ U+2763 HEAVY HEART EXCLAMATION MARK ORNAMENT ❤ U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART ❥ U+2765 ROTATED HEAVY BLACK HEART BULLET ❦ U+2766 FLORAL HEART ❧ U+2767 ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET ⺖ U+2E96 CJK RADICAL HEART ONE ⺗ U+2E97 CJK RADICAL HEART TWO ⼼ U+2F3C KANGXI RADICAL HEART You can, of course, use regular expressions. For example, if you are looking for the "pi" symbol, you could do this: $ ugrep '\bpi\b' REQUIREMENTS: Although this is written in Bash, it assumes you have Perl installed because it greps through the Perl Unicode character name module (/usr/lib/perl5/Unicode/CharName.pm). Note that it would not have made more sense to write this in Perl, since the CharName.pm module doesn't actually include a subroutine for looking up a character based on the description. (Weird.) BUGS: In order to fit this script in the commandlinefu limits, a couple bugs were added. ① Astral characters beyond the BMP (basic multilingual plane) are not displayed correctly, but see below. ② Perl code from the perl module being grepped is sometimes extraneously matched. MISFEATURES: Bash's printf cannot, given a Unicode codepoint, print the resulting character to the terminal. GNU's coreutils printf (usually "/usr/bin/printf") can do so, but it is brokenly pedantic about how many hexadecimal digits follow the escape sequence and will actually die with an error if you give the wrong number. This is especially annoying since Unicode code points are usually variable length with implied leading zeros. The CharNames.pm file represents BMP characters as 4 hexits, but astral characters as 5. In the actual version of this script that I use, I've kludged around this misfeature by zero-padding to 8 hexits like so, $ /usr/bin/printf "\U$(printf "%08x" 0x$hex)" TIP 1: The author recommends "xsel" for command line cut-and-paste. For example, $ ugrep biohazard | xsel TIP 2: In Emacs, instead of running this command in a subshell, you can type Unicode code points directly by pressing Control-Q first, but you'll likely want to change the default input from octal to hexadecimal. (setq read-quoted-char-radix 16). TIP 3: Of course, if you're using X, and you want to type one of the more common unusual characters, it's easiest of all to do it with your Compose (aka Multi) key. For example, hitting [Compose] <3 types ♥.

Run a command when a file is changed

A command to copy mysql tables from a remote host to current host via ssh.

This version compresses the data for transport.

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"

Set laptop display brightness

Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

deaggregate ip ranges

Taking file with ip ranges, each on it's own line like: $cat ipranges.txt 213.87.86.160-213.87.86.193 213.87.87.0-213.87.88.255 91.135.210.0-91.135.210.255 command returns deaggregated ip ranges using ipcalc deaggregate feature like that: 213.87.86.160/27 213.87.86.192/31 213.87.87.0/24 213.87.88.0/24 91.135.210.0/24 Useful for configuring nginx geo module

Find out the active XOrg Server DISPLAY number (from outside)

It's useful when you cannot access your env (systemd) or the process DISPLAY variable is not set. Perhaps also when you have a multi-head/user configuration.

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"

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection

Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Suspend to ram

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Commands using cat (514)

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