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

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
Using -Z with grep and -0 with xargs handles file names with spaces and special characters.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Clear current session history (bash)

Functions to display, save and restore $IFS
You can display, save and restore the value of $IFS using conventional Bash commands, but these functions, which you can add to your ~/.bashrc file make it really easy. To display $IFS use the function ifs shown above. In the sample output, you can see that it displays the characters and their hexadecimal equivalent. This function saves it in a variable called $saveIFS: $ sifs () { saveIFS=$IFS; } Use this function to restore it $ rifs () { IFS=$saveIFS; } Add this line in your ~/.bashrc file to save a readonly copy of $IFS: $ declare -r roIFS=$IFS Use this function to restore that one to $IFS $ rrifs () { IFS=$roIFS; }

BourneShell: Go to previous directory
cd - would return to the previous directory of your cd command. NB: previous dir is always stored in $OLDPWD variable.

Copy a file using dd and watch its progress
This is a more accurate way to watch the progress of a dd process. The $DDPID=$! is needed so that you don't get the PID of the sleep. The sleep 1 is needed because in my testing at least, if you run kill -USR1 against dd too quickly, it will kill it off instead of display the status. So you need to wait a second, probably so that it can configure itself to trap the USR1 signal.

clear the X clipboard
Clears your clipboard if xsel is installed on your machine. If your xsel is dumb, you can also use $xsel --clear --clipboard

Check if it's your binary birthday!
Print out your age in days in binary. Today's my binary birthday, I'm 2^14 days old :-) . This command does bash arithmatic $(( )) on two dates: Today: $(date +%s) Date of birth: $(date +%s -d YYYY-MM-DD) The dates are expressed as the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (Jan 1970), so we devide the difference by 86400 (seconds per day). . Finally we pipe "obase=2; DAYS-OLD" into bc to convert to binary. (obase == output base)

Scan for nearby Bluetooth devices.
Scans local area for visible Bluetooth devices. Use 'hcitool inq' to discover the type of device it is. And use -i hciX option to specify the local Bluetooth device to use.

sync svn working copy and remote repository (auto adding new files)
Lists the local files that are not present in the remote repository (lines beginning with ?) and add them.


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: