All commands

Telnet to Free Internet Chess Server

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:44:19 +0000

$ telnet fics.freechess.org 5000

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

facebook

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:26:50 +0000

$ ping www.facebook.com

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Sort movies by length, longest first

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:14:59 +0000

$ find -name '*.avi' | while read i ; do echo $(mplayer -identify -frames 0 -vo null -nosound "$i" 2>&1 | grep ID_LENGTH | cut -d= -f2)" ""$i" ;done | sort -k1 -r -n | sed 's/^\([^\ ]*\)\ \(.*\)$/\2:\1/g'

handles file names with spaces and colons, fixes sort (numeric!), uses mplayer, same output format as other alternatives

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Clean your broken terminal

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:15:26 +0000

$ reset

If something fracks up your terminal, just type in 'reset' and everything should be good again.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Make an iso file out of your entire hard drive

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:05:17 +0000

$ dd if=/dev/hda of=file.img

Similar.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Clean your broken terminal

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:58:06 +0000

$ stty sane

When some console full-screen program (minicom, vi, some installers) breaks down your terminal, try this command to revert all options to "sane" settings (sane is a built-in combo of a lot of stty options)

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Make an iso file out of your entire hard drive

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:44:53 +0000

$ cat /dev/hda > ~/hda.iso

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Sort movies by length, longest first

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:42:20 +0000

$ for i in *.avi; do echo -n "$i:";mediainfo $i|head | grep PlayTime | cut -d: -f2 ; done | sort -t: -k2 -r

Similar but using mediainfo instead of totem-something

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Remove lines that contain a specific pattern($1) from file($2).

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:40:45 +0000

$ sed -i '/myexpression/d' /path/to/file.txt

The -i option in sed allows in-place editing of the input file.

Replace myexpression with any regular expression.

/expr/d syntax means if the expression matches then delete the line.

You can reverse the functionality to keep matching lines only by using:

sed -i -n '/myexpression/p' /path/to/file.txt

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Create a thumbnail from a video file

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:42:55 +0000

$ thumbnail() { ffmpeg -itsoffset -20 -i $i -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 640x272 ${i%.*}.jpg }

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Remove executable bit from all files in the current directory recursively, excluding other directories

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:41:27 +0000

$ chmod -R -x+X *

With GNU chmod at least it is that simple.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Remove executable bit from all files in the current directory recursively, excluding other directories

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:30:44 +0000

$ find . -type f | while read f; do chmod -x "$f"; done

I hate -exec with find, and this pattern quickly expands to other tasks.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Sort movies by length, longest first

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:59:53 +0000

$ for i in *.avi; do echo -n "$i:";totem-gstreamer-video-indexer $i | grep DURATION | cut -d "=" -f 2 ; done | sort -t: -k2 -r

Sort .avi movies by time length, print the longest first, and so on...

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

check the status of 'dd' in progress

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:27:33 +0000

$ while killall -USR1 dd; do sleep 5; done

Stops when the (last) dd process exits.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Delete everything on hda

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:13:35 +0000

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=16M

If you leave out the block size it defaults to 512 bytes. I set it to 16 Megabytes and it was much faster...

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

check the status of 'dd' in progress

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:03:34 +0000

$ watch -n 10 killall -USR1 dd

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Remove executable bit from all files in the current directory recursively, excluding other directories

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:27:08 +0000

$ find . ! -type d -exec chmod -x {}\;

Useful if you have copied files from an OS without a permission structure (for example, DOS) and you need to disable all executable files but want to be able to descend into your directories.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Create subdirectory and move files into it

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:40:55 +0000

$ (ls; mkdir subdir; echo subdir) | xargs mv

With this form you dont need to cut out target directory using grep/sed/etc.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Both view and pipe the file without saving to disk

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:24:28 +0000

$ cat /path/to/some/file.txt | tee /dev/pts/0 | wc -l

This is a cool trick to view the contents of the file on /dev/pts/0 (or whatever terminal you're using), and also send the contents of that file to another program by way of an unnamed pipe. All the while, you've not bothered saving any extra data to disk, like you might be tempted to do with sed or grep to filter output.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Create a backdoor on a machine to allow remote connection to bash

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:26:53 +0000

$ /bin/bash | nc -l 1234

My netcat (nc-1.84-10.fc6) doesn't have the -e option, so I have to do it like this. Of course, instead of bash, you can use any executable, including scripts.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Upload images to omploader.org from the command line.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:56:52 +0000

$ ompload() { curl -F file1=@"$1" http://omploader.org/upload|awk '/Info:|File:|Thumbnail:|BBCode:/{gsub(/<[^<]*?\/?>/,"");$1=$1;print}';}

This function uploads images to http://omploader.org and then prints out the links to the file.

Some coloring can also be added to the command with:

ompload() { curl -F file1=@"$1" http://omploader.org/upload|awk '/Info:|File:|Thumbnail:|BBCode:/{gsub(/<[^<]*?\/?>/,"");$1=$1;sub(/^/,"\033[0;34m");sub(/:/,"\033[0m:");print}';}

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Play random music from blip.fm

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:48:01 +0000

$ mpg123 `curl -s http://blip.fm/all | sed -e 's#"#\n#g' | grep mp3$ | xargs`

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Play music from youtube without download

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:45:13 +0000

$ wget -q -O - `youtube-dl -b -g $url`| ffmpeg -i - -f mp3 -vn -acodec libmp3lame -| mpg123 -

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

another tweet function

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:54:02 +0000

$ tweet () { curl -u UserName -d status="$*" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml; }

This version of tweet() doesn't require you to put quotes around the body of your tweet... it also prompts you for password. It will still barf on a '!' character.

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

Count emails in an MBOX file

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:31:05 +0000

$ grep -c '^From ' mbox_file

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)