Tagged Questions

15
votes
1answer
345 views

Is there a standard command that always exits with a failure?

I want to test my script with a command that fails. I could use an existing command with bad arguments. I could also write a simple script that immediately exits with a failure. Both of these are easy ...
14
votes
5answers
7k views

Split pages in pdf

I have a scanned pdf file which has scanned two pages on one virtual page (page in pdf file). The resolution is with good quality. The problem is I have to zoom when reading and drag from left to the ...
7
votes
1answer
1k views

find n most frequent words in a file

I want to find, say, 10 most common word in a text file. Firstly, solution should be optimized for keystrokes (in other words - my time). Secondly, for the performance. Here is what I have so far to ...
7
votes
2answers
330 views

Shell Script for going through a dir recursively and chmodding based on conditions of file type

Can anyone point me to either code or a tutorial for writing a shell script that can recursively go through an entire directory structure (starting at the current working directory, or given an ...
7
votes
4answers
551 views

What is the easiest way to execute text from tail at the command line?

Sometimes I'm working on a new (ubuntu) box and I type git and am alerted: The program 'git' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: apt-get install git-core If that happens I ...
6
votes
2answers
741 views

XFCE or pure X11 commands, toggle compositing immediately without restarting X

How can i disable compositing via the command line? I need to disable temporarily for some games, like Nexuiz, for use in a wrapper script to toggle compositing status.
5
votes
3answers
2k views

Storing output of command in shell variable

I have an operation using cut that I would like to assign result to a variable var4=ztemp.xml |cut -f1 -d '.' I get the error: ztemp.xml is not a command The value of var4 never gets ...
5
votes
2answers
549 views

How to tweet using terminal?

I would like to tweet a message using terminal. I tried something like: curl -u 'TwitterUsername':'TwitterPassword' -d status=”Your Message Here” https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml but seems ...
4
votes
4answers
437 views

How can I pass a command line argument into a shell script?

I know that shell scripts just run commands as if they were executed in at the command prompt. I'd like to be able to run shell scripts as if they were functions... That is, taking an input value or ...
4
votes
2answers
296 views

How to list files and directories with directories first

I have two questions. First, which command lists files and directories, but lists directories first? Second question: I want to copy a list of files into a single directory, but make the target ...
4
votes
1answer
423 views

How to create a confirmation question in Linux?

I have a certain command (git push server-name) that has major consequences. How to require confirmation for this command only? It should ignore white space. The confirmation could be Enter 'yes i am ...
3
votes
2answers
699 views

Passing a bash command-line argument containing a dot

How can a command-line argument containing a dot (.) be passed? Are there any escape sequences for capturing characters like dot? The following invocation of a bash-script from the shell does not ...
3
votes
2answers
222 views

Move with possible rename

Is it possible to construct a command that will move the file to another directory and if the same file is already there, generate some random string that is not in the name of some file in the ...
3
votes
2answers
90 views

Make copies of a single directory to multiple directories with different names

I'm trying to replicate a single directory (with sub-directories) to a bunch of new directories based on a list. For example I can: mkdir Fred Barney Thelma Louise Foo Bar How would I copy a premade ...
3
votes
1answer
165 views

Extract directory from wget's stdout

I am trying to wget a tarball from github.com and, without creating a temporary file, extract a subdirectory from it: wget -qO- https://github.com/django-nonrel/django-nonrel/tarball/develop | tar ...
3
votes
3answers
214 views

What's the best way to determine the working directory for UNIX process using 'ps'?

I am running a Ruby command line script (rufus.sh)which ultimately calls Thread.new, which spawns a UNIX process as shown below. I run this script for more than 1 directory as the output of the ps ...
3
votes
1answer
243 views

Multiple renaming files [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: How to clean up file extensions? I'd like to rename files with extension .flac.mp3 to extension .mp3. I used the following command $ for i in *; do mv $i `echo $i | sed ...
3
votes
1answer
158 views

Pausing rsync via bash script?

Is there a way to pause rsync via command line, if it transfers data for over X minutes? I'm working on using it as a backup and would like it to pause every once in a while to prevent the hard disks ...
3
votes
1answer
191 views

Conditionally killing a process based on its output

I have a REPL (read-eval-print-loop) for the Clojure programming language listening on a network socket. I can send it code over the network and the code will be evaluated and the answer sent back to ...
2
votes
1answer
210 views

Help me parse this `find` command

Following command tells me the length of mp4 video files: find -type f -name "*.mp4" -print0 | \ xargs -0 mplayer -vo dummy -ao dummy -identify 2>/dev/null | \ perl -nle ...
2
votes
1answer
1k views

How to get exact file size and file name?

Right now I am using ls -lt /my/directory (see below) then php parses the output. But inconsistently because the delimiter is space and there might be two or more spaces in between two fields. The ...
2
votes
2answers
595 views

creating simple command for sudo apt-get install?

I need to run these commands very often: sudo apt-get install <package> sudo apt-get remove <package> Can I make it simple like: install <package> remove <package> I ...
2
votes
2answers
183 views

How to make duplicates with different names from a single file? [closed]

I want to duplicate the contents of a file. Suppose there is a file named "Hydrogen.element". I want to duplicate the contents of this file with a different name ie.make another file named ...
2
votes
2answers
805 views

How to build a long command string?

I've a sequence of commands to be used along with lot of pipings, something like this: awk '{ if ($8 ~ "isad") {print $2, $5, "SE"} else {print $2, $5, "ANT"} }' ...
2
votes
1answer
81 views

Output redirection and spaces

I'm paranoid about this, but hopefully it's a simple question: Is there any difference between cat file1 | egrep -oP "[Mm]y string" > /home/user/file.txt and cat file1|egrep -oP "[Mm]y ...
2
votes
1answer
100 views

How to have find only search for files in changed directories?

Currently I'm repeatedly doing a 'find' that's too slow. I'm searching for non-hidden executable files within "$root", excluding "$root/bin": find "$root" -type f -perm -o+x -not -path "$root/bin/*" ...
2
votes
2answers
211 views

Executing zsh rehash after build

I have a build script that can change what binaries are in my $PATH (it doesn't edit $PATH itself, but it adds/deletes files to folders that are already in $PATH). zsh's autocompletion doesn't update ...
1
vote
5answers
580 views

How can I monitor all outgoing requests/connections from my machine?

My machine is a server so I want to ignore connections being made to my server (e.g. when someone visits my website). I want to see only connections/requests being made by my server to other places. ...
1
vote
2answers
228 views

Concatenate multiple files under subdirectories

My directory structure is given below x:\Project_2012-158A\Sample_4041 SampleSheet.csv 4041_CGTACG_L002_R1_001.fastq 4041_CGTACG_L002_R2_001.fastq 4041_CGTACG_L006_R2_001.fastq ...
1
vote
1answer
377 views

How to format a curl command for a special task?

There is a search page in a form http://site.com/search.php and it sends a search query via POST request. I want to fetch this request via curl command line tool to inspect a POST request. The HTML ...
1
vote
2answers
744 views

regex find and replace 0x0D, 0x0A characters

I have a text file of a database dump with some line break characters (0x0A0x0D) in the middle of lines. I want to replace them with commas, but I can't do it simply, because those characters are the ...
0
votes
2answers
217 views

Functional shell scripting [closed]

I found out that when I want to create some shell script or advanced command it always made me trouble to remember the names of the commands and their switches. e.g. tr -d '\n' < file | wc -c ...
0
votes
4answers
51 views

concatenating multiple files with multiple headers

Im trying to concatenate multiple files with multiple headers to have one file with all the information in it for example. File 1: Numbers 1 2 3 Letters A B C File 2: Numbers 4 5 6 Letters D E ...
0
votes
1answer
175 views

Run a script after some command were executed

I have a list of scripts ./myscript <param> | grep "asd" ./myotherscript <param> <param> > file ... How can I automaticaly run another script when one of these command in the ...
0
votes
1answer
934 views

How to pkill from a script?

How can I write a script that basically just runs pkill -HUP inetd? I want to restart inetd via a script so I can schedule it to run at a particular time. I tried to write it myself, but I'm getting a ...
0
votes
0answers
19 views

IBM V7000 scripts for monitoring

Hello (I'm no hard core coder:), I try to develop a script to do some very basic monitoring on an IBM SVC. My goal is to get some information about the nodes and my quroum status and then send ...
0
votes
1answer
176 views

Postgres 9.0 linux command to windows command conversion [closed]

i am working on an application using delphi 7 as the front end and postgres 9.0 as the back end. I have to upload images to the server so i use \lo_import and \lo_export for inserting images on the ...
-1
votes
2answers
1k views

clear tmpfs in my case

I am on a Ubuntu machine. I have make a directory under root directory, by: $ sudo mkdir /hello $ sudo mkdir /hello/bye Then I mount tmpfs with size 1024M to /hello/bye by: $ sudo echo "tmpfs ...