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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Trick find -exec option to execute alias

An alias cannot be executed as command in a find -exec line. This form will trick the command line and let you do the job.

Report information about executable launched on system

Aureport is a tool for displaying auditd system log. -x options cause to display launched executable on system. Aureport work with auditd so auditd must be installed an running on a system. Tested on CentOS / Debian

Ping scanning without nmap

Usefull for when you don't have nmap and need to find a missing host. Pings all addresses from 10.1.1.1 to 10.1.1.254, modify for your subnet. Timeout set to 1 sec for speed, if running over a slow connection you should raise that to avoid missing replies. This will clean up the junk, leaving just the IP address: for i in {1..254}; do ping -c 1 -W 1 10.1.1.$i | grep 'from' | cut -d' ' -f 4 | tr -d ':'; done

Follow the most recently updated log files

This command finds the 5 (-n5) most frequently updated logs in /var/log, and then does a multifile tail follow of those log files. Alternately, you can do this to follow a specific list of log files: sudo tail -n0 -f /var/log/{messages,secure,cron,cups/error_log}

resize all JPG images in folder and create new images (w/o overwriting)

Convert all jpegs in the current directory into ~1024*768 pixels and ~ 150 KBytes jpegs

Number of files in a SVN Repository

Number of files in a SVN Repository This command will output the total number of files in a SVN Repository.

Find usb device in realtime

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

cycle through everything sox knows how to read, playing only the first three seconds

I wasted two hours reading the sox documentation and searching on the web for the format of some obscure fscking sound sample, and then finally came up with this. This plays only the first three seconds of your unknown formatted sound file using every one of sox's built-in filetypes. If you don't get an exact match, you may get close. . I could not fit every single type in and keep it under 127 characters, so you will have to replace "..." with the full list obtainable by `$ sox --help` (or try `Show sample output`) . note: /usr/bin/play should be linked to sox on most systems.

Simplified video file renaming

I used this when I had a directory of movies from a camera. I wanted to watch a little of each movie, then rename it depending on what was in the movie. This did the trick for me.

Retrofit a shebang to an existing script

Function to add a shebang to an existing script, handy if you forgot to add it in the first place.

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Commands using cat (514)

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