Commands by nutria (4)

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

Poor man's unsort (randomize lines)

Remove password from Bank Statement

Create incremental backups of individual folders using find and tar-gzip
Problem: I wanted to backup user data individually, using and incremental method. In this example, all user data is located in "/mnt/storage/profiles", and about 25 folders inside, each with a username ( /mnt/storage/profiles/mike; /mnt/storage/profiles/lucy ...) I need each individual folder backed up, not the whole "/mnt/storage/profiles". So, using find while excluding directories depth and creating two variables (tarfile=username & desdir=destination), tar will create a .tgz file for each folder, resulting in a "mike_2013-12-05.tgz" and "lucy_2013-12-05.tgz".

Calculate sum of N numbers (Thanks to flatcap)
replaces "\n" with "+"

reset Mageia urpmi media sources to network only
On Mageia (and Mandriva) Linux, this command will clear your existing urpmi configuration and configure it to use only network sources. It can be useful after you have installed from CD/DVD and don't want to continually be prompted to insert CD/DVD each time you install a package. acknowledgement: blino

Add a progress counter to loop (see sample output)
For this hack you need following function: $ finit() { count=$#; current=1; for i in "$@" ; do echo $current $count; echo $i; current=$((current + 1)); done; } and alias: $ alias fnext='read cur total && echo -n "[$cur/$total] " && read' Inspired by CMake progress counters.

Copy files for backup storage
Backup a whole directory copying only updated files.

Track X Window events in chosen window
After executing this, click on a window you want to track X Window events in. Explaination: "xev will track events in the window with the following -id, which we get by greping window information obtained by xwininfo"

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

Find broken symlinks and delete them
This command is adapted from http://otomaton.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/find-broken-symbolic-links/ Solutions with $ find -L don't work when the link is a loop, an error message is printed.


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: