Post your Command line tricks

[machinebacon]

Good afternoon, John :)
No difference it seems. Wikipedia (!) states:

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alias # Used without arguments; displays a list of all current aliases 
alias -p # Analogous to the above; not available in 4DOS/4NT and PowerShell

Also the 'official' GNU Bash manual on bash builtins says the same: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual ... ltins.html

[rhowaldt]

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       alias [-p] [name[=value] ...]
              Alias with no arguments or with the -p option prints  the  list
              of  aliases  in  the  form alias name=value on standard output.

[machinebacon]

lol, now we need a forth opinion :D

[wuxmedia]

must be historical - to keep some old scripts working?
There a couple of other commands, with listing functions, that have -p as a display list to STDOUT.
bind & complete... there's the fourth man's opinion 8)

[rhowaldt]

well, i think it's just the same thing. maybe some systems require flags in orde to execute commands, and they decided to add the '-p' flag. or maybe it was already there and somebody decided that just typing 'alias' by itself did nothing so would be nice to have it show you your aliases, then later somebody said 'but we already have -p for that', then the other guy says 'too bad i already programmed it, fuck it let's just have them both and let people wonder why the fuck there is 2 options for the same thing trollolol' :D

[wuxmedia]

^ that 8D

[machinebacon]

^^ just me dorkin' around / no harm done / just sayin' / end babblin'? :D

[johnraff]

...and I hadn't even noticed there was a whole page of different stuff after the alias posts...

Bizkit, sorry you got dragged into this.

[johnraff]

Didn't seem worth starting a whole new thread, so I'll post this here:
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HomePage
...more text editors than you could imagine.

[DebianJoe]

Neat little whatnot I figured out while playing with killx and w3m.

So, you want to take some random website and quickly get a cli readout of something there, but without having to actually go look at the page, use w3m and the "-dump" switch to get raw data out of it, and then grep out what you want.

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w3m http://weather.weatherbug.com/MY_STATE/MY_TOWN-weather.html -dump\
| grep -i 'hi:\|lo:\|rain:\|humidity:\|dew point:'

^^Cool for little scripts or perhaps a function.

[machinebacon]

Nice, I think (!) curl does exactly the same like w3m; we might try it.

[DebianJoe]

^^Pretty sure you're right, was just playing with different w3m stuffs when I thought about trying this. It should work fine with curl as well (perhaps even a bit easier on the system.)

Edit: Curl gives raw HTML, not as pretty. :(

[machinebacon]

Hah, it wasn't curl that took it 1:1, it was links2 - it has a -dump option too.
There are some neat little scripts like wikipedia-fetcher or news reader for the command line, usually as functions or alias, I should check my old Debian installation...

Edit: saw your edit, yup. Though the curl output is good if you want to pipe stuff 1:1 into some other document for local storage. Good to know it looks like that.

[DebianJoe]

Another neat little trick: 'ls' in a tree-like structure:

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ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' -e 's/^/   /' -e 's/-/|/'

[machinebacon]

^ wow, check that sed goodness there!

[GekkoP]

^^ wow, simply beautiful

[johnraff]

^^^DJ that's a great bit of code! New entry for .bash_aliases :)

Here's a little trick you probably all know - run this in a terminal window for live system messages:

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sudo tail -f /var/log/messages

Handy when debugging automount and the like.
Or for a little light entertainment:

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 sudo tail -fn1 /var/log/messages | espeak

[wuxmedia]

running fc-list dumps a ton of crap all over my console. "I just wanna know what to type into .Xresource etc.."

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fc-list | cut -d : -f 2 | sort -u | uniq

cleans it up.

[johnraff]

Joe's recursive ls reminded me,

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pstree

to see your processes and their parentage.

[johnraff]

Does file A contain the contents of file B? (sort of multi-line grepping)

Check if string contains substring (there are other ways of course):

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[[ $string = *$substring* ]] && echo "$substring is in $string"

This works even if the strings contain newlines, so you can compare text file contents the same way:

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[[ $(<fileA) = *$(<fileB)* ]] && echo "fileA contains fileB"