Commands using echo (1,545)

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

List your MACs address
The output of ifconfig is localized, using it will fail in non-English environment. "ip" command in iproute2 provides a consistent output and thus is more robust

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}

Get current Xorg resolution via xrandr
Not sure if it works the same on any shell.

Create an animated gif from a Youtube video
requires "youtube-dl" -- sure you can do this with wget and some more obscurity but why waste your time when this great tool is available? the guts consist of mplayer converting a video to a gif -- study this command and read the man page for more information $ mplayer video.flv -ss 00:23 -endpos 6 -vo gif89a:fps=5:output=output.gif -vf scale=400:300 -nosound generates a 6 second gif starting at 23 seconds of play time at 5 fps and a scale of 400x300 start time (-ss)/end time (-endpos) formats: 00:00:00.000 end time should be relative to start time, not absolute. i.e. -endpos 5 == seconds after 0:42 = 0:47 end point play with fps and scale for lower gif sizes the subshell is a solution for the -b flag on youtube-dl which downloads the best quality video, sometimes, which can be various video formats $(ls ${url##*=}*| tail -n1)

tar+pbzip2 a dir

Application network trace based on application name
This command takes an application name as an argument and then it will listen to the tcp traffic and capture packets matching the process Id of the application. The output shows: local address / local port / Remote Address / Remote port / State / Owning Process ID

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"

remove *.jpg smaller than 500x500

return a titlecased version of the string
Needs Bash4. Found at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264428/converting-string-to-lower-case-in-bash-shell-scripting alongside a few other tricks.

Monitoring file handles used by a particular process
-r : repeat mode


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: