Commands using ssh (347)

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

Stop and continue processing on a terminal
This will send the ASCII sequence for DC3 to the currently running tty which results in SIGSTOP (19). You can continue with ASCII sequence for DC1 by pressing CTRL+q which results in SIGCONT (18).

Transfer a file to multiple hosts over ssh
You can push files to up to 32 servers at once assuming ssh keys are in place. Great tool, it is part of the pssh suite.

chmod - change file permissions of a file to be similar of another

Display the tree of all instance of a particular process

Install an mpkg from the command line on OSX
Installing most OSX apps is just a matter of dropping it in /Applications, either GUI-wise or with cp -r. However, many packages are distributed in "mpkg" format, and those have to be installed with an installer. If you don't want to go to the trouble of firing up VNC to install an mpkg, you can use the "installer" command. This will install an application from a .mpkg it to /Applications system-wide. To install a program for just one user, replace "-target /" with "-target username".

Get creation date of a file on ext2-3-4 fs
Return the creation date of a file on ext2, 3, 4 filesystems, because stat command won't show it. Useful on ubuntu, debian, and else

watch snapshots commit in VMware ESX
To monitor .vmdk files during snapshot deletion (commit) on ESX only (ESXi doesn't have the watch command): 1. Navigate to the VM directory containing .vmdk files. # watch "ls -tough --full-time *.vmdk" where: -t sorts by modification time -o do not list group information (to narrow the output) -u sorts by access time -g only here for the purpose to easily remember the created mnemonic word 'tough' -h prints sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G) --full-time sets the time style to full-iso and does not list user information (to narrow the output) optionally useful parameters to the watch command: -d highlight changes between updates -n seconds to wait between updates (default is 2) -t turn off printing the header

use the previous commands params in the current command
Here the !!:1 will take the first parameter from the previous command. This can be used in conjunction with other history commands like ! and so on.

Add directory to $PATH if it's not already there
Sometimes in a script you want to make sure that a directory is in the path, and add it in if it's not already there. In this example, $dir contains the new directory you want to add to the path if it's not already present. There are multiple ways to do this, but this one is a nice clean shell-internal approach. I based it on http://stackoverflow.com/a/1397020. You can also do it using tr to separate the path into lines and grep -x to look for exact matches, like this: $ if ! $(echo "$PATH" | tr ":" "\n" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://stackoverflow.com/a/5048977. Or replace the "echo | tr" part with a shell parameter expansion, like $ if ! $(echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'}" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3209/. There are also other more regex-y ways to do it, but I find the ones listed here easiest to follow. Note some of this is specific to the bash shell.

Stream audio over ssh
This will allow you to convert an audio file to wav format, and send it via ssh to a player on the other computer, which will open and play it there. Of course, substitute your information for the sound file and remote address You do not have to use paplay on the remote end, as it is a PulseAudio thing. If the remote end uses ALSA, you should use aplay instead. If it uses OSS, you should berate them about having a lousy sound system. Also, you're not limited to transmitting encoded as wav either, it's just that AFAIK, most systems don't come with mp3 codecs, but will play wav files fine. If you know SoX is installed on the remote end and has mp3 codecs, you can use the following instead: $ cat Klaxon.mp3 |ssh thelab@company.com play -t mp3 - this will transmit as mp3. Again, use your specific information. if you're not playing mp3s, use another type with the -t option


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: