Updating My Linux Command line Toolbox, episode 2

Part 1

Five more, all from this week:

1. date -u to get your date in UTC

2. pushd and popd – create your own directory stack.  I’m still trying this one out.  (“why not just use the up arrow?”)

3. pbcopy – copy to clipboard from the command line.

4. !$ contains the last arg of the previous command, so you can do something like this:
ls -l filename.*    # check what you have in the dir
vi !$

5. This one is my favorite: !?[string] runs last command that contains that string.

Updating My Linux Command line Toolbox

Over the past few months I’ve been working with some people with many more years of unix-y experience than I have. They’ve been teaching me new stuff, and showing me updated versions of commands I’ve been using in sometimes kludgy ways. Here are 10 examples.

1. join, which feels kind of like a stoneage tool; it’s not that versatile, and I’m sure there are perl one-liners that could do the same thing. But join’s readily available and it’s a fast way to join two files, if they meet the requirements: same file separator, a “key” field (which is easy to add with nl, #2 below), etc.

2. nl to number the lines in a file.

My most-used switches:
nl -v 800 -w 3 -n rn -s, oldfile > newfile
-v = start with this number
-w = number of characters (in this example, numbers > 999 will be truncated)
-n rn = ‘right justified, no 0 padding’ so you don’t have to go back through another round of text processing to strip them off
-s, = use a comma as a field sep

3. truncate as a desperate move to free up some space. Bonus: do this on a log file to confuse your coworkers.

4. watch [1]
Current favorite:
watch -n 10 “psql -d my_db -c \”SELECT datname, procpid, usename, backend_start, xact_start, query_start, waiting, current_query FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE current_query LIKE ‘autovacuum:%’\””

5. lastlog, last, and lastb
most recent login, all logins, and all bad logins

6. df -h instead of df -k
df -k was one of the first unix commands I learned. It used to be easy to read the blocks, Used, and Available columns (they had fewer digits back then). df -h makes it easy again, and shows me the units. The muscle memory on this one has been particularly hard to shed.

7. echo * | wc -w instead of ls | wc -l or ls -1 | wc -l
The first sysadmin I ever worked with taught me ls -1 | wc -l. Turns out you don’t need the -1 to list the files individually, if you are piping the output to another command.

Use echo * to quickly list the number of files in a directory, when that number is more than a few thousand; assumes no spaces in the filenames.

8. awk can be kind of intimidating due to its sheer power and uninformative error messages. I have a small cheatsheet I keep handy, for tasks I do frequently. These are the most recent additions:

To remove everything owned by me in a directory:
ls -l | awk ‘/gabrielle/{print $9}’ | xargs rm

To find all files > 0 size in a directory:
ls -l | awk ‘$5>0{print}’

9. Everything here: https://dougvitale.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/deprecated-linux-networking-commands-and-their-replacements/

10. And sar, which I’ll write a separate post about.

Thanks to Joe, Vibhor, Oscar, and of course MJM.
—
1 – “How did I not know about ‘watch’?” “You were using Solaris all these years, m’dear.”