Commands tagged termcap (5)

  • Unbelievable Shell Colors, Shading, Backgrounds, Effects for Non-X

    I've been using linux for almost a decade and only recently discovered that most terminals like putty, xterm, xfree86, vt100, etc., support hundreds of shades of colors, backgrounds and text/terminal effects. This simply prints out a ton of them, the output is pretty amazing. If you use non-x terminals all the time like I do, it can really be helpful to know how to tweak colors and terminal capabilities. Like: echo $'\33[H\33[2J'


    17
    for c in `seq 0 255`;do t=5;[[ $c -lt 108 ]]&&t=0;for i in `seq $t 5`;do echo -e "\e[0;48;$i;${c}m|| $i:$c `seq -s+0 $(($COLUMNS/2))|tr -d '[0-9]'`\e[0m";done;done
    AskApache · 2009-11-03 09:12:13 9
  • Turn shell tracing and verbosity (set -xv) on/off with 1 command!

    Turn shell tracing and verbosity (set -xv) on/off in any Bourne-type shell If either -x or -v is set, the function turns them both off. If neither is on, both are turned on.


    4
    xv() { case $- in *[xv]*) set +xv;; *) set -xv ;; esac }
    cfajohnson · 2010-02-14 20:57:29 3
  • Terminal Escape Code Zen - Strace and Tput

    Depending on the TERM, the terminfo version, ncurses version, etc.. you may be using a varied assortment of terminal escape codes. With this command you can easily find out exactly what is going on.. This is terminal escape zen! ( 2>&2 strace -f -F -e write -s 1000 sh -c 'echo -e "initc\nis2\ncnorm\nrmso\nsgr0" | tput -S' 2>&1 ) | grep -o '"\\[^"]*"' --color=always "\33]4;%p1%d;rgb:%p2%{255}%*%{1000}%/%2.2X/%p3%{255}%*%{1000}%/%2.2X/%p4%{255}%*%{1000}%/%2.2X\33\\\33[!p\33[?3;4l\33[4l\33>\33[?12l\33[?25h\33[27m\33(B\33[m" Lets say you want to find out what you need to echo in order to get the text to blink.. echo -e "`tput blink`This will blink`tput sgr0` This wont" Now you can use this function instead of calling tput (tput is much smarter for portable code because it works differently depending on the current TERM, and tput -T anyterm works too.) to turn that echo into a much faster executing code. tput queries files, opens files, etc.. but echo is very strait and narrow. So now you can do this: echo -e "\33[5mThis will blink\33(B\33[m This wont" More at http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output


    3
    termtrace(){( strace -s 1000 -e write tput $@ 2>&2 2>&1 ) | grep -o '"[^"]*"';}
    AskApache · 2010-03-17 08:53:41 7
  • PRINT LINE the width of screen or specified using any char including Colors, Escapes and metachars

    One of the first functions programmers learn is how to print a line. This is my 100% bash builtin function to do it, which makes it as optimal as a function can be. The COLUMNS environment variable is also set by bash (including bash resetting its value when you resize your term) so its very efficient. I like pretty-output in my shells and have experimented with several ways to output a line the width of the screen using a minimal amount of code. This is like version 9,000 lol. This function is what I use, though when using colors or other terminal features I create separate functions that call this one, since this is the lowest level type of function. It might be better named printl(), but since I use it so much it's more optimal to have the name contain less chars (both for my programming and for the internal workings). If you do use terminal escapes this will reset to default. tput sgr0 For implementation ideas, check my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output


    2
    L(){ l=`builtin printf %${2:-$COLUMNS}s` && echo -e "${l// /${1:-=}}"; }
    AskApache · 2010-06-14 04:35:30 6
  • Turn shell tracing and verbosity (set -xv) on/off with 1 command!

    Running this command turns shell tracing and shell verbose debugging on or off. Not only does it do that, it also uses your terminals builtin method of setting colors to make debugging much easier. It looks at the current shell options contained in the $- special bash variable and that lets this function set the opposite of the current value. So from the shell you could do a: setx; echo "y" | ( cat -t ) | echo "d"; setx and it will turn on debbuggin. This is an amazingly useful function that is perfect to add system-wide by adding it to /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc.. You can run it from the shell, and you can also use it in your shell scripts like my .bash_profile - http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output


    1
    function setx(){ sed '/[xv]/!Q2' <<< $- && { set +xv; export PS4=">>> "; } || { export PS4="`tput setaf 3`>>> `tput sgr0`"; set -xv; }; }
    AskApache · 2010-02-14 01:25:44 5

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

Command line calculator
works with fractions like 1/3.5

Updating the status on identi.ca using curl.
identica is an open source social networking and micro-blogging service. Based on Laconica, a micro-blogging software package built on the OpenMicroBlogging specification. http://identi.ca/

Cryptographically secure 32-bit RNG in strict ZSH
ZSH ships a couple random number generators via the $RANDOM environment variable and rand48() via zsh/mathfunc, but neither are cryptographically secure. This code produces a 32-bit random number suitable for cryptography. It's only dependency is /dev/urandom and it does not rely on any shell commands or 3rd party utilities. It assumes ZSH was compiled with 64-bit integer support.

list files recursively by size

Mount a partition from within a complete disk dump
Suppose you made a backup of your hard disk with dd: dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/disk/backup.img This command enables you to mount a partition from inside this image, so you can access your files directly. Substitute PARTITION=1 with the number of the partition you want to mount (returned from sfdisk -d yourfile.img).

Copy data using gtar
It copies the entire current working directory to the destination directory with compression enabled.

Show webcam output
Show the webcam output with mplayer.

Let's make screen and ssh-agent friends
When you start screen as `ssh-agent screen`, agent will die after detatch. If you don't want to take care about files when stored agent's pid/socket/etc, you have to use this command.

Check disk for bad sectors
Checks HDD for bad sectors, just like scandisk or chkdisk under some other operating system ;-).

Use QEMU to create a hardware dual-boot without rebooting
After downloading an ISO image, assuming you have QEMU installed, it’s possible to boot an ISO image in a virtual machine and then install that ISO from within the virtual machine directly to a physical drive, bypassing the need to reboot. Simply pass the ISO image as the -cdrom parameter, followed by “format=raw,file=/dev/sdb” (replace /dev/sdb with the drive you want to install to) as the hard drive parameter (making absolutely certain to specify the raw format, of course). Once you boot into the ISO image with QEMU, just run the installer as if it were a virtual machine — it’ll just use the physical device as an install target. After that, you’ll be able to seamlessly boot multiple distros (or even other operating systems) at once.

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: