Commands using xargs (769)

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

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Wait for file to stop changing
This loop will finish if a file hasn't changed in the last 10 seconds. . It checks the file's modification timestamp against the clock. If 10 seconds have elapsed without any change to the file, then the loop ends. . This script will give a false positive if there's a 10 second delay between updates, e.g. due to network congestion . How does it work? 'date +%s' gives the current time in seconds 'stat -c %Y' gives the file's last modification time in seconds '$(( ))' is bash's way of doing maths '[ X -lt 10 ]' tests the result is Less Than 10 otherwise sleep for 1 second and repeat . Note: Clever as this script is, inotify is smarter.

whois surfing my web ?

Run skype using your GTK theme
I use this to make skype blend better into my desktop :) --disable-cleanlooks might not be nescessary to achieve the wanted effect.

Print current runlevel
Prints current runlevel and system start time. On older systems it also shows the last init state. Pretty useful on remote systems, pretty useless on local ones :)

Recursively list all of the files in a directory, group them by extension and calculate the average of the file sizes in each group
Here's an annotated version of the command, using full-names instead of aliases. It is exactly equivalent to the short-hand version. # Recursively list all the files in the current directory. Get-ChildItem -Recurse | # Filter out the sub-directories themselves. Where-Object { return -not $_.PsIsContainer; } | # Group the resulting files by their extensions. Group-Object Extension | # Pluck the Name and Count properties of each group and define # a custom expression that calculates the average of the sizes # of the files in that group. # The back-tick is a line-continuation character. Select-Object ` Name, Count, @{ Name = 'Average'; Expression = { # Average the Length (sizes) of the files in the current group. return ($_.Group | Measure-Object -Average Length).Average; } } | # Format the results in a tabular view, automatically adjusted to # widths of the values in the columns. Format-Table -AutoSize ` @{ # Rename the Name property to something more sensible. Name = 'Extension'; Expression = { return $_.Name; } }, Count, @{ # Format the Average property to display KB instead of bytes # and use a formatting string to show it rounded to two decimals. Name = 'Average Size (KB)'; # The "1KB" is a built-in constant which is equal to 1024. Expression = { return $_.Average / 1KB }; FormatString = '{0:N2}' }

Git diff last two commits
How about this one ?

connect to X login screen via vnc
the $15 may change for you depending on your distro, etc...

a simple bash one-liner to create php file and call php function

Remove BOM (Byte Order Mark) from text file
Takes file (text.txt), removes BOM from it, and outputs the result to a new file (newFile.txt). BOM is "Byte Order Mark" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark]), an invisible, non-breaking, zero-length character. In other words, if you see a DIFF with "" at the beginning, you've got a byte order mark, which can't be removed without this command or a hex editor. It can appear for a number of reasons, such as getting copied to/from a UNIX filesystem...


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: