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
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paste one file at a time instead of in parallel
paste one file at a time instead of in parallel

Turn white color to transparent for a series of png images
mogrify can be used like convert. The difference is that mogrify overwrites files: http://www.imagemagick.org/www/mogrify.html Of course, other source colors can be used as well.

Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/
Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

Watch and cat the last file to enter a directory
Great for watching things like Maildir's or any other queue directory.

Record live sound in Vorbis (eg for bootlegs or to take audio notes)
This will record the capture channel of your soundcard, directly encoded in Ogg Vorbis, in stereo at quality 5 (I'm using this to record live jam sessions from my line input). You can choose which device to capture (eg. line input, microphone or PCM output) with $ alsamixer -V capture You can do the same thing and live encode in MP3 or FLAC if you wish, just check FLAC and LAME man pages.

This allows you to find a string on a set of files recursivly
The -r is for recursive, -F for fixed strings, --include='*.txt' identifies you want all txt files to be search any wildcard will apply, then the string you are looking for and the final * to ensure you go through all files and folders within the folder you execute it.

Remote execute command as sudoer via ssh
Example: remote install an application(wine). sshpass -p 'mypssword' ssh -t mysshloginname@192.168.1.22 "echo 'mypassword' | sudo -S apt-get install wine" Tested on Ubuntu.

Get a free shell account on a community server
Bash process substitution which curls the website 'hashbang.sh' and executes the shell script embedded in the page. This is obviously not the most secure way to run something like this, and we will scold you if you try. The smarter way would be: Download locally over SSL > curl https://hashbang.sh >> hashbang.sh Verify integrty with GPG (If available) > gpg --recv-keys 0xD2C4C74D8FAA96F5 > gpg --verify hashbang.sh Inspect source code > less hashbang.sh Run > chmod +x hashbang.sh > ./hashbang.sh

Multi line grep using sed and specifying open/close tags
This line does not include your closing tag in the output.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him


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