one-liners
Category archives for one-liners
Why the Linux Market Share is Flat, and other things you will want to see.
Posted by Greg Laden on August 30, 2010 he Linux market share continues to flatline. Here’s a piece on why. My explanation? Same as for a lot of things: People are morons, by and large. The article linked to mentions very good reasons that Linux should indeed not be adopted by others. But most of those reasons actually apply to other OS’s as…
How to reset all of your Gnome settings in Linux
Posted by Greg Laden on August 1, 2010 And, in theory, this should apply to other software as well, but don’t get mad at me if something goes terribly wrong….
What Linux Distro and Version am I using????
Posted by Greg Laden on November 14, 2009 In the old days, you could just use the “help” menu item to figure this out (drilling down to “about”) but now there is so much “helpful” crap in the dialog that opens when you do so, that it has become much less helpful. So just open a command line and cause the contents of…
Fixing your Dictionary
Posted by Greg Laden on November 13, 2009 You are typing some text into an editing window in your FIrefox Browser, and you spell something terribly wrong. Like this: I am so glad I upgreaded to Firefox 2.0, because it has a built in spell checker. You see the error where you meant to type “upgraded.” So you right click on it to…
Linux Terminal Fun: Find out about your hardware
Posted by Greg Laden on November 13, 2009 The command dmidecode is ” is a tool for dumping a computer’s DMI (some say SMBIOS) table contents in a human-readable format. This table contains a description of the system’s hardware components, as well as other useful pieces of information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision.” (from the “man”).
Software Needed: Enhanced web search
Posted by Greg Laden on November 2, 2009 Google is great, and yes, I know all those tricks that make it greater. But I still want to use REGEX in some cases. So, I figured out a way to do that, in theory, all I need now is the code…
Fun with the Linux seq command
Posted by Greg Laden on September 19, 2009 Do you know about the obscure Linux command ‘seq’????? It is actually quite cool.
Win friends and fix up your data with regular expressions
Posted by Greg Laden on September 4, 2009 In many instances, a well thought-out regular expression can convince most non-technical people in the room that you’re a computer genius who’s brain possesses more synapses, forming more bridges and firing more rapidly than anyone’s ever should. Oh this is so true….
In the beginning there was cat …
Posted by Greg Laden on August 19, 2009 … and I’m not talking about Ceiling Cat. I’m talking about the Linux command cat.
A One Liner for Stripping Comments
Posted by Greg Laden on August 18, 2009 Getting rid of those pesky comments in your all important configuration files.
Today’s Linux Command Line Lesson: counting files
Posted by Greg Laden on August 17, 2009 Type: ls | wc -l The output is an approximation of how many files are in the current directory.
The Command Line Part 3: Underlying Power
Posted by Greg Laden on August 12, 2009 This is a continuation of a discussion of the role of the command line in both the functionality and the culture of the three main operating systems used today general purpose desktop computers: Linux, and the other two. Today’s toic: Underlying power.
May the force (of the command line) be with you
Posted by Greg Laden on August 11, 2009 This is the second part of a series of posts on the Power of the Command Line. (The first post was: The Command Line in Linux, Mac OSX and Windows) The lesson of today’s post is: Don’t be a chump, learn to love the command line!
The Command Line in Linux, Mac OSX and Windows
Posted by Greg Laden on August 10, 2009 This is the first in a series of posts on just what the title says: The command line. The main point will be this: Stop worrying about the command line.
Today’s Linux One-Liner
Posted by Greg Laden on August 6, 2009 Try this: ps -eo user,pcpu,pid,cmd | sort -r -k2 | head -6 What the heck does that do?
Command line magic: csv file processing
Posted by Greg Laden on May 11, 2009 Is he doing this from memory or is he looking it up as he goes along?
Redirecting Output
Posted by Greg Laden on May 9, 2009 Sean Powers’ tip of the day: Thank you Sean. now, can we do a better job that Sean did and come up with some actual uses for this ability?
What is your disk usage?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 10, 2009 In Linux, if you want to find out what your disk usage is by directory, in order to see what the heck is filling up your hard drive, try this at the command prompt:
ping traceroute
Posted by Greg Laden on April 4, 2009 Very funny, sean. I’m talking about the simu-bot.
As usual, quotes save the day in bash. And more.
Posted by Greg Laden on March 31, 2009 If you try to sudo your way through a command with pipes and/or redirects, part of the sequence of commands may be producing sudo-read/writeable streams of data or data objects, which the other parts of the sequence can’t use because they were spawned by your shell and not root. The solution is to embed the…
Bash Programming Quiz
Posted by Greg Laden on November 13, 2008 First, a couple of quick news items: What are the Top Ten Open Source productivity applications? You might be surprised. A good open source video editor is just around the corner. The problem is, how far away is that corner. But there is hope on the horizon. And now, for todays Bash Programming Quiz. Create…
How to make your Linux computer boot faster
Posted by Greg Laden on November 9, 2008 Your computer probably boots with grub, and in a grub configuration file, there is a “timeout” value that you can reduce. It is not recommended that you let it be less than 2, but if it is three or more, go ahead and change it.* I’ll make it real simple for you, if you are…
Win friends and fix up your data with regular expressions
Posted by Greg Laden on September 12, 2008 In many instances, a well thought-out regular expression can convince most non-technical people in the room that you’re a computer genius who’s brain possesses more synapses, forming more bridges and firing more rapidly than anyone’s ever should. Oh this is so true. The other day I was working on cleaning up some data with a…
, which is now available for the 
