Commands using grep (1,935)

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

Create a visually twisted effect by alternating the direction of the "staples" effect vertically. The effect is achieved by moving odd-numbered lines from right to left and even-numbered lines from left to right.
The effect is achieved by moving odd-numbered lines from right to left and even-numbered lines from left to right. For odd-numbered lines (with an index j), the ((j + i) % 2 == 0) condition is satisfied. In this case, the line width is set to i, resulting in the line moving from left to right. For even-numbered lines, the ((j + i) % 2 == 0) condition is not satisfied. The line width is set to $(tput cols) - i, causing the line to move from right to left. This alternating direction of movement creates a twisted visual effect as the lines appear to move in opposite directions. The code runs in a continuous loop, repeatedly updating the lines with changing background colors. There is a slight pause of 0.05 seconds between each iteration to control the speed of the animation.

An alias to re-run last command with sudo. Similar to "sudo !!"
I didn't come up with this myself, but I always add this to my .bash_aliases file. It's essentially the same idea as running "sudo !!" except it's much easier to type. (You can't just alias "sudo !!", it doesn't really work for reasons I don't understand.) "fc" is a shell built-in for editing and re-running previous commands. The -l flag tells it to display the line rather than edit it, and the -n command tells it to omit the line number. -1 tells it to print the previous line. For more detail: $help fc

extract element of xml
Prints the value of a XML node rather than the entire node.

See system users

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions
I often forget to sudo before editing a file I don't have write permissions on. When you come to save that file and get the infamous "E212: Can't open file for writing", just issue that vim command in order to save the file without the need to save it to a temp file and then copy it back again.

Share your terminal session (remotely or whatever)
Force the user you want to watch doing things into doing his things in a screen session. Then simply attach yourself to that session with the command shown above. Works only if you are on the same machine, of course

delete files containing matching text
-r recursively -Z zero byte after each file name instead of the usual newline -l only filenames

Commit only newly added files to subversion repository

skip broken piece of a loop but not exit the loop entirely
useful for loops like for i in $(cat list_of_servers); do ssh -q $i hostname; done if there is an unreachable server, you can just press ctrl + \ to skip that server and continue on with the loop

Clone /
Clone linux installation.


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: