Interesting commands or programs for the CLI

baldurpet · 01-30-2009, 03:32 AM

Hey, I'm really like interesting commands for the command line so I thought I'd ask people who've used Linux a lot.

The only one I know is:

jp2a (JPG to ASCII), a small program which converts JPG images to ASCII. It's an amazingly fun program to use, and everybody think it's awesome to be able to view images in ASCII. If you want to view a photo which isn't JPG you can simply use the convert program and pipe it in.

Please post some cool commands you've witnessed over the years, and explain a little about them

I know you've got some

alan_ri · 01-30-2009, 05:51 AM

I like this one;

Code:

ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -r -k1 | less

It will help to determine which process is eating the CPU/s.

arungoodboy · 01-30-2009, 06:33 AM

Nice. I like antiword, which allows you to read word documents on terminals, and does a pretty good job of it.
Also the tree shell script, which you can get here.

sycamorex · 01-30-2009, 07:13 AM

I have been learning sed recently. I did not know it's so versatile. My next one will be awk.

pixellany · 01-30-2009, 08:04 AM

The Imagemagick suite---capabilities seem almost unlimited.

ncsuapex · 01-30-2009, 08:45 AM

Quote:

ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -r -k1 | less

awesome! Just added that to my cli arsenal!

You can do a lot with the find command:

find files over x days old:
find /path -mtime +x

find pattern in a file
find /etc -name '*.*' -type f | xargs grep 'pattern'

delete files when argument too long error
find . -name '*' | xargs rm

baldurpet · 01-30-2009, 10:28 AM

Yes! This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for!
These commands are a goldmine, especially some like the search functions and "tree" function.

Keep 'em coming!

Edit: The one to determine how much memory a program is using is really helpful. Wouldn't using something like head instead of less be better though?

alan_ri · 01-30-2009, 08:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by baldurpet

Edit: The one to determine how much memory a program is using is really helpful. Wouldn't using something like head instead of less be better though?

I like less.Here's one more that will let you read tar.gz files without unpacking them;

Code:

tar --to-stdout -zxf file.tar.gz | less

kap4lin · 01-31-2009, 01:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by alan_ri

Code:

tar --to-stdout -zxf file.tar.gz | less

You can add this to your .bash_profile (or other shell rcs):

Code:

# make less more friendly for non-text input files, see lesspipe(1)
[ -x /usr/bin/lesspipe ] && eval "$(SHELL=/bin/sh lesspipe)"

It can list through a many type of archives. Take a look at man lesspipe

kap4lin · 01-31-2009, 02:04 AM

And not ntop. Something where I can see which process is using (maximum) the network (say eth0).

repo · 01-31-2009, 03:00 AM

Quote:

ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -r -k1 | less

Why not use top?

ncsuapex · 02-19-2009, 12:10 PM

Quote:

watch

Is a command I've been using a lot lately. Its pretty useful to watch a file to see it get updated. For example. I've been test cloning a lot of drives over the last few weeks and I use

Quote:

watch cat /proc/mdstat

to watch the RAID sync. It updates the file you are watching every 2 seconds.

brianL · 02-19-2009, 01:30 PM

Sort of related to this subject. There's a relatively new live CD devoted entirely to the CLI. All sorts of applications, plus some instructions, to get people used to using the CLI. I've burned it, but not tried it yet. INX:
http://inx.maincontent.net/index.html