Commands using grep (1,935)

  • Within /proc and /sys there are a lot of subdirectories, which carry pseudofiles with only one value as content. Instead of cat-ing all single files (which takes quite a time) or do a "cat *" (which makes it hard to find the filename/content relation), just grep recursively for . or use "grep . /blabla/*" (star instead of -r flag). For better readability you might also want to pipe the output to "column -t -s : ". Show Sample Output


    4
    grep -r . /sys/class/net/eth0/statistics
    olorin · 2009-08-05 08:20:39 3
  • xargs -P N spawns up to N worker processes. -n 40 means each grep command gets up to 40 file names each on the command line.


    4
    find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -P 4 -n 40 grep -i foobar
    ketil · 2009-08-05 23:18:44 8
  • Will return your internal IP address. Show Sample Output


    4
    ifconfig $devices | grep "inet addr" | sed 's/.*inet addr:\([0-9\.]*\).*/\1/g'
    matthewbauer · 2009-08-06 21:43:22 3

  • 4
    find . -name "*.[ch]" | xargs grep "TODO"
    freestyler · 2009-08-12 16:53:01 5

  • 4
    file -i * | grep -c 'text/plain'
    markszabo · 2009-08-16 22:29:35 3
  • Character: "?" is the Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard. Specifically it is the hex bytes EF BB BF, which form the UTF-8 representation of the BOM, misinterpreted as ISO 8859/1 text instead of UTF-8. Show Sample Output


    4
    find . -type f | grep -rl $'\xEF\xBB\xBF'
    pfredrik · 2009-08-19 13:27:09 3
  • to download latest version of "util", maybe insert a sort if they wont be shown in right order. curl lists all files on mirror, grep your util, tail -1 will gets the one lists on the bottom and get it with wget Show Sample Output


    4
    mirror=ftp://somemirror.com/with/alot/versions/but/no/latest/link; latest=$(curl -l $mirror/ 2>/dev/null | grep util | tail -1); wget $mirror/$latest
    peshay · 2009-08-24 15:58:31 282
  • This command uses nmap to perform reverse DNS lookups on a subnet. It produces a list of IP addresses with the corresponding PTR record for a given subnet. You can enter the subnet in CDIR notation (i.e. /24 for a Class C)). You could add "--dns-servers x.x.x.x" after the "-sL" if you need the lookups to be performed on a specific DNS server. On some installations nmap needs sudo I believe. Also I hope awk is standard on most distros. Show Sample Output


    4
    nmap -R -sL 209.85.229.99/27 | awk '{if($3=="not")print"("$2") no PTR";else print$3" is "$2}' | grep '('
    netsaint · 2009-09-02 16:33:15 5
  • This corrects duplicate output from the previous command. Show Sample Output


    4
    netstat -lantp | grep -i establ | awk -F/ '{print $2}' | sort | uniq
    HarimaKenji · 2009-09-19 14:42:31 7

  • 4
    mpg123 `curl -s http://blip.fm/all | sed -e 's#"#\n#g' | grep mp3$ | xargs`
    torrid · 2009-11-07 14:48:01 7
  • midentify.sh is part of mplayer, but you might have to locate it on your box. Show Sample Output


    4
    /usr/share/mplayer/midentify.sh `find . -name "*.avi" -print` | grep ID_LENGTH | awk -F "=" '{sum += $2} END {print sum/60/60; print "hours"}'
    equant · 2009-11-17 03:33:20 11
  • Write each FILE to standard output, with line numbers added. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input. Show Sample Output


    4
    ps aux | grep [a]pache2 | nl
    donnoman · 2009-12-17 18:48:09 4
  • Somewhat shorter version. Show Sample Output


    4
    fping -r1 -g <subnet> 2> /dev/null | grep unreachable | cut -f1 -d' '
    unixmonkey7953 · 2010-01-22 09:07:04 3
  • xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this: touch important_file touch 'not important_file' ls not* | xargs rm Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.


    4
    grep -rl oldstring . | parallel sed -i -e 's/oldstring/newstring/'
    unixmonkey8046 · 2010-01-28 08:44:16 6

  • 4
    /usr/sbin/dmidecode | grep -i "current speed"
    eastwind · 2010-02-19 07:28:07 5
  • You'll need "feh" to set the background from the commandline. Install with "apt-get install feh" Thanks to the Redditors on this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bira4/is_there_a_linux_version_of_this_preferably_a/


    4
    curl http://www.reddit.com/r/wallpapers.rss | grep -Eo 'http:[^&]+jpg' | head -1 | xargs feh --bg-seamless
    shavenwarthog · 2010-03-27 00:08:40 5
  • Check if you have 64bit by looking for "lm" in cpuinfo. lm stands for "long mem". This can also be used without being root.


    4
    if cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep " lm " &> /dev/null; then echo "Got 64bit" ; fi
    xeor · 2010-04-10 15:31:58 6
  • Ever gone to a site that has an MP3 embedded into a pesky flash player, but no download link? Well, this one-liner will yank the names of those tunes straight out of FF's cache in a nice, easy to read list. What you do with them after that is *ahem* no concern of mine. ;) Show Sample Output


    4
    for i in `ls ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache`; do file $i | grep -i mpeg | awk '{print $1}' | sed s/.$//; done
    BoxingOctopus · 2010-04-11 23:14:18 7
  • in "a.html", find all images referred as relative URI in an HTML file by "src" attribute of "img" element, replace them with "data:" URI. This useful to create single HTML file holding all images in it, as a replacement of the IE-created .mht file format. The generated HTML works fine on every other browser except IE, as well as many HTML editors like kompozer, while the .mht format only works for IE, but not for every other browser. Compare to the KDE's own single-file-web-page format "war" format, which only opens correctly on KDE, the HTML file with "data:" URI is more universally supported. The above command have many bugs. My commandline-fu is too limited to fix them: 1. it assume all URLs are relative URIs, thus works in this case: <img src="images/logo.png"/> but does not work in this case: <img src="http://www.my_web_site.com/images/logo.png" /> This may not be a bug, as full URIs perhaps should be ignored in many use cases. 2. it only work for images whoes file name suffix is one of .jpg, .gif, .png, albeit images with .jpeg suffix and those without extension names at all are legal to HTML. 3. image file name is not allowed to contain "(" even though frequently used, as in "(copy of) my car.jpg". Besides, neither single nor double quotes are allowed. 4. There is infact a big flaw in this, file names are actually used as regular expression to be replaced with base64 encoded content. This cause the script to fail in many other cases. Example: 'D:\images\logo.png', where backward slash have different meaning in regular expression. I don't know how to fix this. I don't know any command that can do full text (no regular expression) replacement the way basic editors like gedit does. 5. The original a.html are not preserved, so a user should make a copy first in case things go wrong.


    4
    grep -ioE "(url\(|src=)['\"]?[^)'\"]*" a.html | grep -ioE "[^\"'(]*.(jpg|png|gif)" | while read l ; do sed -i "s>$l>data:image/${l/[^.]*./};base64,`openssl enc -base64 -in $l| tr -d '\n'`>" a.html ; done;
    zhangweiwu · 2010-05-05 14:07:51 13
  • When trying to play a sound you may sometimes get an error saying that your sound card is already used, but not by what process. This will list all processes playing sound, useful to kill processes that you no longer need but that keep using your sound card. Show Sample Output


    4
    lsof | grep pcm
    Miles · 2010-05-16 12:12:01 3
  • This will show the amount of physical RAM that is left unused by the system. Show Sample Output


    4
    grep '^MemFree:' /proc/meminfo | awk '{ mem=($2)/(1024) ; printf "%0.0f MB\n", mem }'
    dbbolton · 2010-06-30 18:33:29 3
  • Each file in the current folder is uploaded to imageshack.us If the folder contains other filetypes change: for files in * to: for files in *.jpg (to upload ONLY .jpg files) Additionally you can try (results may vary): for files in *.jpg *.png The output URL is encased with BB image tags for use in a forum. Show Sample Output


    4
    imageshack() { for files in *; do curl -H Expect: -F fileupload="@$files" -F xml=yes -# "http://www.imageshack.us/index.php" | grep image_link | sed -e 's/<image_link>/[IMG]/g' -e 's/<\/image_link>/[\/IMG]/g'; done; }
    operatinghazard · 2010-10-01 06:50:04 6
  • Some conf file are very long (squid.conf) This command help to read it.


    4
    grep ^[^#] /etc/file.conf
    longdrink · 2010-10-20 12:26:34 9
  • Can be integrated into your .bashrc if you like. You'll probably want to grep out my name. Show Sample Output


    4
    lynx --dump http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/random/plaintext | grep .
    root · 2010-12-04 20:53:10 5
  • This one-liner will output installed packages sorted by size in Kilobytes. Show Sample Output


    4
    paste <(pacman -Q | awk '{ print $1; }' | xargs pacman -Qi | grep 'Size' | awk '{ print $4$5; }') <(pacman -Q | awk '{print $1; }') | sort -n | column -t
    BruceLEET · 2011-01-07 18:43:18 7
  • ‹ First  < 7 8 9 10 11 >  Last ›

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

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

Clean up poorly named TV shows.
Replace 'SHOWNAME' with the name of the TV show. Add -n to test the command without renaming files. Check the 'sample output'.

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
Using xargs is better than: $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \; as the -exec switch uses a separate process for each remove. xargs splits the streamed files into more managable subsets so less processes are required.

Realtime lines per second in a log file
Displays the realtime line output rate of a logfile. -l tels pv to count lines -i to refresh every 10 seconds -l option is not in old versions of pv. If the remote system has an old pv version: ssh tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | pv -l -i10 -r >/dev/null

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Download and extract a *tar.gz file with curl.

Do Google search from that command line opening into a new Firefox tab.
Usage: google "[search string]" Example: google "something im searching for" This will launch firefox and execute a google search in a new tab with the provided search string. You must provide the path to your Firefox binary if using cygwin to $ff or create an alias like follows: alias firefox='/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe' Most Linux flavors with Firefox installed will use just ff="firefox" and even OSX.

Print Memory Utilization Percentage For a specific process and it's children
Change the name of the process and what is echoed to suit your needs. The brackets around the h in the grep statement cause grep to skip over "grep httpd", it is the equivalent of grep -v grep although more elegant.

pattern match in awk - no grep
Rather than chain a string of greps together and pipe them to awk, use awk to do all the work. In the above example, a string would be output to stdout if it matched pattern1 AND pattern2, but NOT pattern3.

Create a video that is supported by youtube
Takes an mpeg video and coverts it to a youtube compatible flv file. The -r 25 sets the frame rate for PAL, for NTSC use 29.97


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: