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Command Line Love

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Ubuntu UK Podcast – Command line Love

S04 E10 – Sun and Steel

Check when your current password expires

expiry -c

S04 E09 – Brave New World

Puts the last few commands into a bash script.

history | tail -n+1 | head -n | sed ‘s/^[0-9 ]\{7\}//’ >> ~/script.sh

S04 E05 – The Nomad

Copy *everything* in the current directory and subdirectories (including hidden files, symlinks and so on) with permissions intact.

find . -depth -print0 | cpio –null –sparse -pvd /new/dir/

S04 E03 – Lightning Strikes Twice

Clear out your old tweets and dents from Gwibber

echo "delete from messages;vacuum;" | sqlite3 ~/.config/gwibber/gwibber.sqlite

S04 E01 – New Frontier

Russ Philips sent us this command to help generate secure passwords

while [ `expr length "$WORD"` -lt 8 ]; do WORD=`shuf -n1 /usr/share/dict/words`; done; echo $WORD; WORD=""

S03 E23 – Departure of a grand old man

Check status of Ubuntu One file transfers

#!/bin/bash
TOTAL=`u1sdtool –current-transfers | grep deflated | head -n 1 | cut -f7 -d’ ‘`
PROGRESS=`u1sdtool –current-transfers | grep read | head -n 1 | cut -f7 -d’ ‘`

expr \( $PROGRESS \* 100 \) / $TOTAL

S03 E22 – Long may it wave

Scan the network for machines running SSH from David Leadbeater, also see http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html

After listening live to our command line love above, Graham Bleach told us how to turn broadcast ping back on by tweaking:
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts

nmap -A -v -p 22 x.x.x.x/x
e.g. (nmap -A -v -p 22 192.168.0.0/24)

S03 E21 – The Pipers Price

Process runtime

ps -eo stime,pid,cmd

S03 E20 – The Midnight Flyer

Multiple Firefox sessions

firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote
(Set up several profiles)
firefox -P [profilename] -no-remote

S03 E19 – If we only knew

Colour Man Pages from Greg Thompson

1) install the "most" pager utility. sudo apt-get install most

2) put export PAGER="most" in your ~/.bashrc
3) Logout, Login
4) man

S03 E18 – Laughing Gas

Simplify reading your email: http://offlineimap.org/

offlineimap

S03 E15 – Sharp Shooters

Command line love this week was contributed by loyal listener Mark Johnson. Bashish is a theme enviroment for text terminals. It can change colors, font,
transparency and background image on a per-application basis.

bashish

S03 E13 – Three Wise Fools

We have a double-whammy of Command Line Love, first upgrade the OS from the command line and second to reset your terminal

do-release-upgrade
reset

S03 E04 – Capturing Bad Bill

Stringing together a couple of commands into a script is easy enough to do. In this example Ciemon puts together the commands to update your Ubuntu system:

# A script to update and dist-uprade

echo "Updating software sources and then uprading the distro"

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

S03 E03 – Behind the screen

Josh Holland contributed the following: Bash stores your most recent commands as a command history. Most people are aware of being able to press the up and down arrow keys and Ctrl-R to scan through this history, but there are a couple of other ways to use it too.

You can type !cp and bash will repeat the last command that started with cp. As a special case, you can use !! to repeat the last command and !-n to go back n lines. You can also use ^string1^string2^ to repeat the last command with string1 replaced by string2.

S03 E02 – Their Purple Moment

xrandr -q | grep -w Screen

S02 E19 – The Final Test

Show a list of logged in users and what they’re doing with these two commands!

w

last

S02 E15 – Beautiful Chaos

Eject your CD/DVD drive and then close the tray 1 second later!

eject /dev/sdb; sleep 1; eject -t /dev/sdb

S02 E14 – The Centre

List open connections and ports.

lsof -i
watch -d "netstat -ntauple"

S02 E13 – The Tribe of Gum

Ciemon gets a well deserved break from Command Linux Luurve, with a submission from Alan Bell.

Pop the following text in a text file called showman.sh in your home directory

#!/bin/bash
if [ -z $DISPLAY ]
then
#not in X so starting man in the foreground

man $1
else
#X is running so we can pop up the man page in a pretty window
gnome-help man:$1 2>/dev/null &
fi

chmod +x showman.sh

Edit your .bashrc file and at the end add
alias man="~/showman.sh"

S02 E11 – Slipback

Produce nicely formatted printable man pages:

man -t byobu | ps2pdf – > man_byobu.pdf
man byobu | col -b > man_byobu.txt

S02 E10 – Day of Reckoning

Checking net connections and throttling other peoples computers

sudo mii-tool

S02 E09 – The Dimensions of Time

Combining the watch, date and figlet commands to make a terminal based, configurable clock

watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet"

S02 E08 – The Stolen Earth

Tweeting and Denting from the command line.

BONUS TIP!: Putting a space before a command in the bash shell prevents it from being kept in the history

curl -u user:pass -d status="Tweeting from the shell" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

curl -u user:pass -d status="Denting from the shell" http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml

S02 E07 – The Crusaders

Get details of your hardware in a HTML document.

lshw -html > hardware.html