Commands by evil_otto (2)

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

Happy Days
AFAIR this is the wording ;)

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Print names of all video files encoded with h264

list files recursively by size

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
recursively traverse the directory structure from . down, look for string "oldstring" in all files, and replace it with "newstring", wherever found also: $ grep -rl oldstring . |xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/oldstring/newstring'

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

list files recursively by size

Multi-line grep
Using perl you can search for patterns spanning several lines, a thing that grep can't do. Append the list of files to above command or pipe a file through it, just as with regular grep. If you add the 's' modifier to the regex, the dot '.' also matches line endings, useful if you don't known how many lines you need are between parts of your pattern. Change '*' to '*?' to make it greedy, that is match only as few characters as possible. See also http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1764/display-a-block-of-text-with-awk to do a similar thing with awk. Edit: The undef has to be put in a begin-block, or a match in the first line would not be found.

Copy sparse files
This causes cp to detect and omit large blocks of nulls. Sparse files are useful for implying a lot of disk space without actually having to write it all out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file You can use it in a pipe too: $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=5 |cp --sparse=always /dev/stdin SPARSE_FILE

Disconnect a wireless client on an atheros-based access point
This command will disconnect the user whose mac was specified from the current list of clients from the wireless network when the network card is working in access point mode. Works on atheros-based access points which use the madwifi driver (not sure, but don't think it will work on access points which are not atheros-based, as it uses the atheros's iwpriv extensions). It will not prevent the user from reconnecting to the network, but may force the user to roam to another AP, with stronger signal.

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: