Linux Command Directory

I just found this page on the OReilly website – a Linux Command Directory

Click on any of the 687 commands below to get a description and list of available options. All links in the command summaries point to the online version of the book on Safari Bookshelf.

It doesn’t cover everything (what could?) but it could be a useful page to bookmark.

awk one-liners

I have previously plugged the great list of sed 1-liners at http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt.

Here is a similar (if shorter) list of handy awk 1-liners:

http://www.sap-basis-abap.com/unix/awk-one-liner-tips.htm:

Print column1, column5 and column7 of a data file or output of any columns list

awk '{print $1, $5, $7}' data_file

cat file_name |awk '{print $1 $5 $7}'

ls –al |awk '{print $1, $5, $7}' -- Prints file_permissions,size and date

List all files names whose file size greater than zero.

ls –al |awk '$5 > 0 {print $9}'

List all files whose file size equal to 512bytes.

ls –al |awk '$5 == 0 {print $9}'

print all lines

awk '{print }' file_name

awk '{print 0}' file_name

Number of lines in a file

awk ' END {print NR}' file_name

Number of columns in each row of a file

awk '{print NF}' file_name

Sort the output of file and eliminate duplicate rows

awk '{print $1, $5, $7}' |sort –u

List all file names whose file size is greater than 512bytes and owner is “oracle”

ls –al |awk '$3 == "oracle" && $5 > 512 {print $9}'

List all file names whose owner could be either “oracle” or “root”

ls –al |awk '$3 == "oracle" || $3 == "root" {print $9}'

list all the files whose owner is not “oracle

ls –al |awk '$3 != "oracle" {print $9}'

List all lines which has at least one or more characters

awk 'NF > 0 {print }' file_name

List all lines longer that 50 characters

awk 'length($0) > 50 {print }' file_name

List first two columns

awk '{print $1, $2}' file_name

Swap first two columns of a file and print

awk '{temp = $1; $1 = $2; $2 = temp; print }' file_name

Replace first column as “ORACLE” in a data file

awk '{$1 = "ORACLE"; print }' data_file

Remove first column values in a data file

awk '{$1 =""; print }' data_file

Calculate total size of a directory in Mb

ls –al |awk '{total +=$5};END {print "Total size: " total/1024/1024 " Mb"}'

Calculate total size of a directory including sub directories in Mb

ls –lR |awk '{total +=$5};END {print "Total size: " total/1024/1024 " Mb"}'

Find largest file in a directory including sub directories

ls –lR |awk '{print $5 "\t" $9}' |sort –n |tail -1

Saving, Escaping, and Restoring positional parameters in a POSIX shell

http://www.seanius.net/blog/2009/03/saving-and-restoring-positional-params/ has a really good post about how “shift” loses the original command-line arguments, discusses various seemingly-obvious ways of restoring them, explores why they fail for certain types of input, and provides what seems to be a working solution:

one way you could try to store/save them would be to save the original copy of $@ and use eval set — later on to change it back to the saved variable

… but as it turns out, that doesn’t work with spaces, or quotes. Excellent, really concise description of the problem(s) and solution(s).

Using GNU Grep for Fun and Profit!

Shell Script: GetCluster – a shell script I happen to have written today; uses a few features of GNU Grep, whilst being tolerant of non-GNU greps (at the cost of some functionality).

This simple shell script is an example of the kind of thing that can easily be done with a few simple commands. As it is intended for the Solaris platform, which does not necessarily include GNU’s grep, some additional complexity is required to see what the platform’s grep utility is capable of.

This is achieved by:
1) Set the PATH to pick up the GNU tools first: PATH=/usr/sfw/bin:$PATH
2) Find grep (ggrep if possible; the existence of ggrep suggests that grep itself is not GNU’s grep):
type ggrep >/dev/null 2>&1
if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]; then
GREP=`which ggrep`
else
GREP=`which grep`
fi


It then finds a file, which could be in one of many places:
CLUSTERTOC=`ls clustertoc .clustertoc /cdrom/cdrom0/Solaris*/Product/.clustertoc /cdrom/Solaris*/Product/.clustertoc /mnt/Solaris*/Product/.clustertoc 2>/dev/null|head -1`
What this does, is identify the first succesful match (the rest go to /dev/null). If none is found, the CLUSTERTOC will not be a valid file (note: this gets us the added bonus that it will complain if clustertoc is a device driver, pipe, etc).

It then looks for “SUNW_CSRMEMBER” in the clustertoc, using “grep -n” to get the line number, then passing that linenumber on to head so as to limit the output to only contain those lines. Any lines below that point would refer to other clusters, and be irrelevant. We want to get the last of the relevant part of the file, so that the tail command below will give us what we need.

GNU Grep has a “-A n” and “-B n” facility to say “include n lines After the matching line” or “include n lines Before the matching line”. We use “-A” here to get the following lines which describe the pacakge in more detail:
head -${linenum} $CLUSTERTOC |$GREP -A4 "^CLUSTER="|cut -d"=" -f2-|tail -4

See the readme file for specific output – the Solaris (non-GNU) version has notably less detail than the GNU version.

Hopefully the script (http://steve-parker.org/code/sh/getcluster/getcluster.sh) is in other ways sufficiently self-explanatory.

The input file (http://steve-parker.org/code/sh/getcluster/clustertoc is relatively simple, and should explain any other queries.

Still – this simple script may provoke a few questions; please do play with it and ask away, if anything is unclear.

Happy Second Birthday!

I have missed the second birthday of this blog; starting with Hello World on 17th January 2007, this blog has seen a small growth, but the comments posted show that people have found it to be useful, which is good.

Traffic

Statistics

I hope that you continue to find it useful; I really will try to post a bit more often in 2009!

Steve

A very happy Christmas to all readers

echo unccl puevfgznf | tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m

This is a very simplistic thing called “rot13″, whereby “a” becomes “n”, “b” becomes “o”, “c” becomes “p”, and so on. The tr utility is ideal for simple string manipulation like this.

Happy Christmas to all!

ssh port forwarding without starting a new session

You can forward ports with ssh like this:

$ ssh -L 8080:localhost:80 user@remotehost

This will log you in to remotehost as user, and port 8080 on your local machine will be tunnelled to port 80 on remotehost. If remotehost can see a machine that you can’t (for example, if it’s on an internal network), you can even do this:

$ ssh -L 8080:internalhost:80 user@borderhost

This will log you in to borderhost, and localhost:8080 will be directed to internalhost:80, even though you may not be able to see internalhost directly yourself.

What I didn’t know until I read Nico Golde’s blog today, is that you can do this interactively, with an existing session. Tilde (~) is the default escape character, and ~C (note that’s an uppercase C) gets you a shell session within ssh itself:

$ ssh user@remotehost
user@remotehost$ ~C
ssh> -L 8080:localhost:80
Forwarding port.
user@remotehost$

Emptying deleted files

Mike Hommey has a nice article on clearing down deleted (but still-open) files:
http://glandium.org/blog/?p=211. He explains the problem clearly, and goes on to provide the solution, too. Well worth bookmarking, for that 2am emergency!

someone had to free some space on a 1GB filesystem, and thought a good idea would be to delete that 860MB log file that nobody cares about. Except that it didn’t really remove it, but he didn’t really check.

Later, the “filesystem full” problem came back at someone else, who came to ask me what files from a small list he could remove. But the files were pretty small, and that wouldn’t have freed enough space. That gave me the feeling that we probably were in this typical case I introduced this post with, which du -sk confirmed: 970MB used on the filesystem according to df, but only 110MB worth of data…

Mike has solutions to this for Solaris and Linux; lsof is also useful for this kind of thing, on systems which have it.

more (or less) vi

When using the more tool (this works with less, also, and less is generally more useful; you can scroll backwards and forwards with less), you can press “v” to start editing the file, in vi, at the line you are currently viewing.

This works on Linux and Solaris; please confirm on other OSes as appropriate, though I would assume that what works on more on Solaris, will work on more or less on just about any OS.

This makes using more or less far more powerful than before, and a new way into vi.

chmod syntax… be careful!

Ben Hutchings has noted a quirk in the chmod syntax: If you use the “chmod o-x” syntax, but omit the “o” (Others) (or the “u” (User) or “g” (Group)), it will default to “a” (All).

So “chmod -x foo” becomes “chmod a-x foo“; similarly, “chmod +x foo” becomes “chmod a+x foo“