This version uses read instead of eval.

This example, for example, produces the output, "Fri Feb 13 15:26:30 EST 2009"

Shorter, easier to remember version of cmd#7636 NTP is better, but there are situations where it can't be used. In those cases, you can do this to sync the local time to a server. Show Sample Output

If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command. # creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/`date +git-$USER@$HOSTNAME-%m-%d-%g` -C 'webmaster@askapache.com' # /home/gpl/.ssh/git-gplnet@askapache.github.com-04-22-10 # create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory tar -czf $(date +$HOME/.backups/%m-%d-%g-%R-`sed -u 's/\//#/g' <<< $PWD`.tgz) . # tar -czf /home/gpl/.backups/04-22-10-01:13-#home#gpl#.rr#src.tgz . I personally find myself having to reference date --help quite a bit as a result. So this nice alias saves me a lot of time. This is one bdash mofo. Works in sh and bash (posix), but will likely need to be changed for other shells due to the parameter substitution going on.. Just extend the sed command, I prefer sed to pretty much everything anyways.. but it's always preferable to put in the extra effort to go for as much builtin use as you can. Otherwise it's not a top one-liner, it's a lazyboy recliner. Here's the old version: alias dateh='date --help|sed "/^ *%%/,/^ *%Z/!d;s/ \+/ /g"|while read l;do date "+ %${l/% */}_${l/% */}_${l#* }";done|column -s_ -t' This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ] Show Sample Output

Not perl but shorter.

Good for automating reports that need to run from between two dates. Show Sample Output

That works in all softs, CLI or GUI... I don't want to waste time to all the time typing the same stuff . So, I have that command in my window manager shortcuts ( meta+l ). All the window managers have editable shortcuts AFAIK. If not, or you don't want to use it that way, you can easily use the xbindkeys soft. I you're using kde4, you can run : systemsettings then open "inputs actions" and create a new shortcut. For Gnome take a look there : http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-create-keyboard-shortcuts-in-gnome/ A more advanced one, with strings and newlines : xvkbd -xsendevent -text "---8<-----\nToday date is: $(date +%Y%m%d)\n---8<-----" For complicated or long paste, you can feed xvkbd with a file : xvkbd -xsendevent -file <file> You can simulate ^C ( control+c ) too or others combinations of keys : xvkbd -text "\C\Ac" There's no man page nor help ( On my Archlinux distro ), but you can see online doc there : http://homepage3.nifty.com/tsato/xvkbd/ Show Sample Output

This command takes a 1280x1024 p picture from the webcam. If prefer it smaller, try changing the -s parameter: qqvga is the tiniest, vga is 640x480, svga is 800x600 and so on. Get your smile on and press enter! :)

Not a discovery but a useful one nontheless. In the above example date format is 'yyyymmdd'. For other possible formats see 'man date'. This command can be also very convenient when aliased to some meaningful name: alias mkdd='mkdir $(date +%Y%m%d)'

Use `zless` to read the content of your *rss.gz file: zless commandlinefu-contribs-backup-2009-08-10-07.40.39.rss.gz Show Sample Output

This will log your internet download speed. You can run gnuplot -persist <(echo "plot 'bps' with lines") to get a graph of it.

No command substitution but subshell redirection

Twitter stream feeds now require authentication. This command is the FIRST in a set of five commands you'll need to get Twitter authorization for your final Twitter command. *** IMPORTANT *** Before you start, you have to get some authorization info for your "app" from Twitter. Carefully follow the instructions below: Go to dev.twitter.com/apps and choose "Create a new application". Fill in the form. You can pick any name for your app. After submitting, click on "Create my access token". Keep the resulting page open, as you'll need information from it below. If you closed the page, or want to get back to it in the future, just go to dev.twitter.com/apps Now customize FIVE THINGS on the command line as follows: 1. Replace the string "Consumer key" by copying & pasting your custom consumer key from the Twitter apps page. 2. Replace the string "Consumer secret" by copying & pasting your consumer secret from the Twitter apps page. 3. Replace the string "Access token" by copying & pasting your access token from the Twitter apps page. 4. Replace string "Access token secret" by copying & pasting your own token secret from the Twitter apps page. 5. Replace the string 19258798 with the Twitter UserID NUMBER (this is **NOT** the normal Twitter NAME of the user you want the tweet feed from. If you don't know the UserID number, head over to www.idfromuser.com and type in the user's regular Twitter name. The site will return their Twitter UserID number to you. 19258798 is the Twitter UserID for commandlinefu, so if you don't change that, you'll receive commandlinefu tweets, uhm... on the commandline :) Congratulations! You're done creating all the keys! Environment variables k1, k2, k3, and k4 now hold the four Twitter keys you will need for your next step. The variables should really have been named better, e.g. "Consumer_key", but in later commands the 256-character limit forced me to use short, unclear names here. Just remember k stands for "key". Again, remember, you can always review your requested Twitter keys at dev.twitter.com/apps. Our command line also creates four additional environment variables that are needed in the oauth process: "once", "ts", "hmac" and "id". "once" is a random number used only once that is part of the oauth procedure. HMAC is the actual key that will be used later for signing the base string. "ts" is a timestamp in the Posix time format. The last variable (id) is the user id number of the Twitter user you want to get feeds from. Note that id is ***NOT*** the twitter name, if you didn't know that, see www.idfromuser.com If you want to learn more about oauth authentication, visit oauth.net and/or go to dev.twitter.com/apps, click on any of your apps and then click on "Oauth tool" Now go look at my next command, i.e. step2, to see what happens next to these eight variables.

This is freaking sweet!!! Here is the full alias, (I didn't want to cause display problems on commandlinefu.com's homepage): alias tarred='( ( D=`builtin pwd`; F=$(date +$HOME/`sed "s,[/ ],#,g" <<< ${D/${HOME}/}`#-%F.tgz); S=$SECONDS; tar --ignore-failed-read --transform "s,^${D%/*},`date +${D%/*}.%F`,S" -czPf "$"F "$D" && logger -s "Tarred $D to $F in $(($SECONDS-$S)) seconds" ) & )' Creates a .tgz archive of whatever directory it is run from, in the background, detached from current shell so if you logout it will still complete. Also, you can run this as many times as you want, if the archive .tgz already exists, it just moves it to a numbered backup '--backup=numbered'. The coolest part of this is the transformation performed by tar and sed so that the archive file names are automatically created, and when you extract the archive file it is completely safe thanks to the transform command. If you archive lets say /home/tombdigger/new-stuff-to-backup/ it will create the archive /home/#home#tombdigger#new-stuff-to-backup#-2010-11-18.tgz Then when you extract it, like tar -xvzf #home#tombdigger#new-stuff-to-backup#-2010-11-18.tgz instead of overwriting an existing /home/tombdigger/new-stuff-to-backup/ directory, it will extract to /home/tombdigger/new-stuff-to-backup.2010-11-18/ Basically, the tar archive filename is the PWD with all '/' replaced with '#', and the date is appended to the name so that multiple archives are easily managed. This example saves all archives to your $HOME/archive-name.tgz, but I have a $BKDIR variable with my backup location for each shell user, so I just replaced HOME with BKDIR in the alias. So when I ran this in /opt/askapache/SOURCE/lockfile-progs-0.1.11/ the archive was created at /askapache-bk/#opt#askapache#SOURCE#lockfile-progs-0.1.11#-2010-11-18.tgz Upon completion, uses the universal logger tool to output its completion to syslog and stderr (printed to your terminal), just remove that part if you don't want it, or just remove the '-s ' option from logger to keep the logs only in syslog and not on your terminal. Here's how my syslog server recorded this.. 2010-11-18T00:44:13-05:00 gravedigger.askapache.com (127.0.0.5) [user] [notice] (logger:) Tarred /opt/askapache/SOURCE/lockfile-progs-0.1.11 to /askapache-bk/tarred/#opt#SOURCE#lockfile-progs-0.1.11#-2010-11-18.tgz in 4 seconds Caveats Really this is very robust and foolproof, the only issues I ever have with it (I've been using this for years on my web servers) is if you run it in a directory and then a file changes in that directory, you get a warning message and your archive might have a problem for the changed file. This happens when running this in a logs directory, a temp dir, etc.. That's the only issue I've ever had, really nothing more than a heads up. Advanced: This is a simple alias, and very useful as it works on basically every linux box with semi-current tar and GNU coreutils, bash, and sed.. But if you want to customize it or pass parameters (like a dir to backup instead of pwd), check out this function I use.. this is what I created the alias from BTW, replacing my aa_status function with logger, and adding $SECONDS runtime instead of using tar's --totals function tarred () { local GZIP='--fast' PWD=${1:-`pwd`} F=$(date +${BKDIR}/%m-%d-%g-%H%M-`sed -u 's/[\/\ ]/#/g' [[ ! -r "$PWD" ]] && echo "Bad permissions for $PWD" 1>&2 && return 2; ( ( tar --totals --ignore-failed-read --transform "s@^${PWD%/*}@`date +${PWD%/*}.%m-%d-%g`@S" -czPf $F $PWD && aa_status "Completed Tarp of $PWD to $F" ) & ) } #From my .bash_profile http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Show Sample Output

This is very useful if you need to show someone some text from a distance. (Like someone standing over your shoulder...) I'd recommend aliasing it to something like: alias osd_cat="osd_cat -o 400 -s 8 -c blue -d 60 -f -*-bitstream\ vera\ sans-*-*-*--200-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" xosd is the utility that provides osd_cat.

You can also do this for seconds, minutes, hours, etc... Can't use dates before the epoch, though. Show Sample Output

QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.

Another function to stick into your .bashrc This spits out the time two minutes in the future, but already formatted for pasting into your crontab file for testing without any thought required on your part. Frequently things don't work the way you expect inside a crontab job, and you probably want to find out now that your $PATH is completely different inside of cron or other global variables aren't defined. So this will generate a date you can use for testing now, and then later you can change it to run at 5:37 am on a Sunday evening. Show Sample Output

The "-d" option for gnu's "date" command can calculate positive or negative offset from any time, including "now". You can even specify a source timezone (the output timezone can be set with the TZ environment variable). Useful! Fun! Not very well documented! Show Sample Output

This script creates date based backups of the files. It copies the files to the same place the original ones are but with an additional extension that is the timestamp of the copy on the following format: YearMonthDay-HourMinuteSecond Show Sample Output

This is useful when watching a log file that does not contain timestamps itself. If the file already has content when starting the command, the first lines will have the "wrong" timestamp when the command was started and not when the lines were originally written.

date -ud @1320198157

Displays the same output as "cal", but with the current day highlighted (probably dependent on gnu grep, as I'm not sure other grep's support the "--color=auto" option). Tested and working on Ubuntu 11 and OSX Lion. Show Sample Output

Today Show Sample Output