The major benefit of this approach is that the user does not need to know the exact command. All that it takes to flush the DNS is to click on the flush button. A traceroute is started after entering the IP or domain name in the form.

The updates/installer, storage and misc tabs at the top contain similar commands that make the life of a system administrator or user just a bit easier. Links to various important system tools like the device manager, event viewer or user control are displayed at the bottom of every screen in the program.

Some users might say that they can issue the commands faster using the command line. While that may be true the majority of users will likely find a tool like Matt’s System Helper-Outer beneficial and time saving. The software can be downloaded from the developer’s website. No information about the compatibility of the software are posted on the developer’s homepage. It worked fine on a Windows XP SP3 test system.

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Curl is a tool that transfers data to or from a server. Curl supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS,  SCP,  SFTP,  TFTP,  DICT, TELNET,  LDAP  or  FILE protocols and works without user interaction. But the neat thing about curl is that it offers a ton of various tricks for the clever end user. One of those tricks is fetching and putting data to/from a server – like Google and Twitter.

What you’ll need

In order to achieve these tasks you will need to have installed both curl and html2text. Since I am showing you how to use these tools for command line tricks, there’s no need to figure up the GUI tools. So we will install both tools from the command line. To do so you need to open up your terminal and issue a command similar to:

sudo apt-get install curl html2text

You will be prompted for your sudo password and then asked to verify the installation. Hit ‘Y’ to continue on with the installation.

Once these two pieces of software are installed, it’s time to work some “magic”.

Searching Google

In order to do this you need to pipe one command through another. Piping is done with the help of the “|” character separating the commands. In this case you are going to pipe the curl command through the html2text command. What this will do is render the html fetched from Google into plain text.

In order to get curl to search a web site you will have to use a single argument with the command. The argument is:

-A

which instructs curl to send the user agent string to a web site so the site thinks it is actually a web browser doing the search. Crafty.

So the command looks like this:

curl -A Mozilla http://www.google.com/search?q='Jack Wallen' |html2text -width 80

Notice I use the single quotes. If you are searching for a single word this is not needed. If there is a space between two words, put them in single quotes. The results from this search would look like:

9. **** My Review of Jack Wallen's Post: �10 Reasons Why Linux Will ... ****
Windows 7 may be generating some positive buzz, but Jack Wallen remains
skeptical. In fact, he says it's only a matter of time before Linux takes
its ...
techxav.com/.../my-review-of-10-reasons-why-linux-will-triumph-over-
windows/ -Cached - Similar
10. **** Jack Wallen - news ****
Jack Wallen asks Why aren't schools adopting open source? and the answer
is simply exposure to open source. Getting thousands of students to call
and write ...
www.wikio.co.uk/news/Jack+Wallen -Cached - Similar

Because these results will fly by you might want to do one more trick with this command by sending it to a file instead. To do this we will use the “>” character and a file name like so:

curl -A Mozilla http://www.google.com/search?q='Jack Wallen' |html2text -width 80 > search

Once the search is done, issue the command less search and you will see the results of your search.

Update Twitter status

The same kind of trick is done with your twitter status. To do this you would issue a command like:

curl -u user:password -d status='Your tweet' http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Where ‘Your tweet’ is the status update you want to enter.

Right after you issue that command a bunch of information will be returned. This information is your profile rendered in XML. I have yet to find a way to turn that off.

Final thoughts

The command line is an incredibly powerful tool. Imagine what you can do with these two examples. You could set up a cron job to update your status automatically. Or you could create a script to automatically gather data from Google searches. The possibilites are limitless.

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The 4chan.org Dumper is a simple command line utility that can be used to download an entire forum or part of a forum with one command. A forum at 4chan usually consists of 15 (or so) pages with posts by users.

The basic command to download images from a page at 4chan is [dump4chan.exe [url]]. There are a handful of optional parameters that can be added including the ability to select a specific output folder, to dump the whole board, the replies and to hide the command line on the screen.

The command 4chan.exe http://zip.4chan.org/v/imgboard.html videogames -all would for example download all images from the video games forum at 4chan and save them in the videogames subfolder. Duplicate images will be skipped automatically. Users who want to download pictures regularly might want to think about creating a batch script for the process to be able to do so more comfortable. 4Chan Dumper is a free software that requires the Microsoft .net Framework.

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But because grep is so handy, it’s hard to know where to start. Of course you can use grep in the standard way, but when you can do so much with a command, why not learn some cool tricks. And that’s what we’ll do here – learn how to use grep to really make it useful.

Basic usage

Before we get into some fun stuff, we should look at the basic command structure. To use grep in its most basic form you follow this structure:

grep STRING FILE

Where STRING is the string of characters you want to search for and FILE is the file you want to search.

Say, for instance, I want to search the file test.txt for the string “Linux” (no quotes). I can do this with the command:

grep Linux test.txt

What grep will do is print out (at the prompt) every line in the file that contains the word Linux. But what if you are searching a large configuration file and you need to find the location of a specific option. To do this you can add the “n” switch which will print out the line numbers associated with each line. Let’s look at a different example. Say you need to find out what port Dansguardian listens to. Instead of scrolling through every line of the /etc/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf file for the string “port” (no quotes), you could issue the command:

grep -n port /etc/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf

which would report back something like:

6:# Web Access Denied Reporting (does not affect logging)
10:#  1 = report why but not what denied phrase
11:#  2 = report fully
14:reportinglevel = 3
17:# The HTML template within this dir is only used when reportinglevel
87:# the port that DansGuardian listens to.
88:filterport = 8080
93:# the port DansGuardian connects to proxy on
94:proxyport = 3128
97:# dansguardian reporting script was copied. Only used in reporting levels 1 and 2.
153:# the naughtyness limit will be log

So you can see that line 88 is the filter port and 94 is the proxy port. Easy. Now let’s see what else grep can do.

Lines before and after

What if you not only want to see the single line associated with a string, but also a certain amount of lines above and below that line. You can do this using the -A and -B switches like so (we’ll stick with our dansguardian example):

grep -B1 -A2 -n port dansguardian.conf

The above command would print out not only each line containing the string “port” (no quotes) but also the 1 line above it and the next two lines below it.

Pipe other commands

You remember the dmesg command. This command prints out the kernel buffer – it’s where you learn a lot about your machine. What if you want to check out CPU information in the dmesg output. You can issue the command dmesg | less and scroll around until you find it, or you can issue the command:

dmesg | grep -n CPU

which will print out all the dmesg output that contains the string CPU and the lines numbers associated with each line.

Search directories

You can also have grep help you in your search of directories. To do this you would use it in conjunction with, say, the find command. Say you were looking for the configuration file for the nano text editor but you had no idea what it was called or where it was located. You could pipe the output of the find command to grep (as the root or sudo user) like so:

find / | grep nano | less

and you would see among the output:

/etc/nanorc
Bingo! There’s your configuration file.

Final thoughts

As you can see there are a number of ways that the grep command can be of assistance. And this is only scratching the surface. Do you have a nifty way to use grep? If so, share it with your fellow ghacks members.

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The website of the developer contains the download link but also samples of the functionality of the command line tool. The basic command for the tool is nircmd command parameters. There are more than 80 commands to chose from very specific ones like changing the system volume to advanced commands that manipulate Registry entries or are execute on remote computer systems.

A practical example that shows the complexity of the command tool would be the command to turn off the computer system which can be done with nircmd.exe exitwin poweroff. An advanced version in the form of multiremote copy “c:\temp\computers.txt” exitwin poweroff force of this exists that can turn off all remote computer systems specified in the text file computers.txt

Some of the more common uses for the nircmd command line tool are writing and deleting values in the Windows Registry, writing values to ini files, connecting to a VPN network or Internet account, changing file attributes, turning off the monitor or working with remote computers.

A selection of useful commands:

• nircmd regedit “~$clipboard$” – Will open the Registry key that has been copied to the Windows Clipboard
• nircmd.exe service restart [servicename] – Will restart the service specified in [servicename]. Works also with start, stop, pause and setting startup types.
• nircmd.exe setprocesspriority [processname] high / nircmd.exe setprocessaffinity [processname] 0 1 – Change the process priority or process affinity of a selected process.
• nircmd.exe killprocess [processname] – Kills the specified process

The help file that is supplied with the download of the command line tool is containing all commands and their possible parameters. This is a great tool especially for users who write batch files but also for those who like to work from the command line.

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ID3 Mass Tagger can add or edit id3 and id3v2 tags in multiple music files on a computer system. It currently supports the ID3 v1.1, Lyrics 3 v2.0 and ID3v2 formats which limits it somewhat to music formats that support these as well.

The developer’s homepage contains a few usage examples and downloads for Windows, Linux, Dos and FreeBSD including the source code of the application. Not all parameters are explained on the homepage though. The Readme document that is included in the download explains them all and should be read after unpacking the files to the local computer.

Some basic usage examples are the following:

Strip all id3v1 tags from all mp3 files in a folder.

id3 -d *.mp3

Copy id3v2 tags to id3v1 tags in all files

id3 -2 -1 -u "*.mp3"

Removes embedded images and padding from all mp3 recursively starting at /mydocuments

id3 -2 -rAPIC -s 0 -R "*.mp3" "/my documents"

ID3 Mass Tagger is a powerful command line music tagger. It works best in conjunction with batch files or shortcuts but can also be used separately. Could be useful for someone who is editing lots of music files on a regular basis.

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Each submitted Linux command – to be honest there are a few command submissions for other operating systems but the majority is pure Linux – lists the command itself and a description provided by the author of the command. There will also be information about the author, the date the Linux command has been submitted and the amount of votes that it received.

Logged in users can vote, leave comments or report a command as malicious. Command-Line Fu can be accessed with an Open ID.

The site features a search engine and will also post new commands submitted to the site to a Twitter account. The site would do good to provide a list of all available commands to print it or save it in a text document format. It is still a very interesting resource for Linux users who work with the Linux command line regularly.

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There are a couple of searching tools that immediately come to mind to take care of your searching needs. The first tool is locate and the second is find. I much prefer the former tool because it is much faster. But both tools can do the job. Both tools are run from the command line and can be run as either the root or a standard user. Let’s take a quick look at each.

Locate

The locate command does not actually search through the directory hierarchy. What locate does is search through a database for the files you are looking for.  Because of this the search is faster. But because it uses a database that means the database has to be updated in order for new to show up in results (or deleted files to not show up in results). So before you actually start using this command you will want to update the database. In order to update the database used by locate you need to issue the command updatedb. It might be wise to set up a cron job to have the database updated regularly (as most of us won’t remember to update the database as often as it is necessary.)

Once you have the database updated you are ready to search. The locate command is simple:

locate FILENAME

(Where FILENAME is the actual name of the file you are searching.

Naturally there are switches you can use with the command. The most useful of these are:

(NOTE: Switches will be proceeded by the “-” character.)

• c – Instead of writing the resulting names it writes the number of matches found.
• d – Use a different database than the default.
• i – Ignore case
• r – Use a regular expression.

The last switch should really raise the eyebrows of the hard core at heart. The locate command can use regular expressions which makes this command VERY useful.

Find

Unlike the locate command, find does search through the filesystem hierarchy. Because of this find is much slower than locate. But also because of this, there is no need to update a database. So the find command always will have the most up-to-date results.

The syntax of the find command is very similar to that of locate.

find FILENAME

Where FILENAME is the actual name of the file name to search.

And, like locate (and nearly every Linux command), there are switches to enhance the usability. The most useful of these switches are:

(NOTE: Switches will be proceeded  by the “-” character.)

• L – Follow symbolic links
• delete – Will delete the found files.
• exec ; COMMAND FILENAME- Will execute the COMMAND on the FILENAME.

The find command is actually quite a bit more complex than locate. Because find’s actually purpose is to examine files (the end results can be found files), find does much more. But for command line file searching, it does perform admirably.

Final Thoughts

My preferences is to use locate. I always use locate before I will use a gui search tool. I trust the results, the results are faster, and often more accurate (so long as I have updated the database.) Give either of these tools a try. You will most likely be happy with the results (unless, of course, you can’t find the file you’re trying to locate.)

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The gnome-terminal comes pre-installed with any GNOME desktop installation, so if you’re running GNOME you won’t have to do any further installation. You might, however, want to undertake some configuration changes. We’ll examine some of those options here.

Default gnome-terminal Window

When you start up the gnome-terminal you will be greeted by the default profile with a single tab open.

The default features you will notice immediately are the menu bar and the scroll bar. Outside of the bash prompt, the menu bar will be where you take care of most of your gnome-terminal business. Let’s examine what you will find in each menu entry:

File: In this menu entry you can open/close a new tab, open/close a new terminal, and/or create a new profile.

Edit: In this menu entry you can copy/paste, edit your profiles, and/or configure keyboard shortcuts.

View: In this menu entry you can configure gnome-terminal to show/hide the menubar, and/or the scrollbar or you can zoom in or out.

Terminal: In this menu entry you can change your profile, change your window title, set character encoding, reset your terminal, and/or reset and clear your terminal.

Tabs: In this menu entry you can cycle through your open tabs and/or detach a tab (so it is its own window).

Help: In this menu entry you can open up the GNOME Help system to learn about gnome-terminal and you can open the “about gnome-terminal” window.

That’s it for the tabs.

As I mentioned, the gnome-terminal is fairly configurable. You can make this terminal as minimal as you like. You can remove the scrollbar and the menubar if you like. To do this click on the View menu and de-select both the scrollbar and the menubar. What that leaves you with is nothing more than a terminal prompt in a window. Or does it? If you right click anywhere in the gnome-terminal window a menu will appear. From that menu you can select to, once again, show the menubar. Once the menubar is back you can then select to show the scrollbar.

Profiles

One of the nicest aspects of the gnome-terminal is that you can create profiles. Each profile can reflect, say, a different job. Say you want to have a root user profile. This can make for an easy way to instantly know you are using the root user (so you don’t commit any command-line fouls that could damage your system). To create a new profile click on File and then select New Profile.  What you will see is a small window asking you to name the new profile and base the new profile on a pre-existing profile.

Once the new profile is named the main Profile editor window will appear where you can really tweak your profile. There are six tabs within the Profile editor:

General: Configure the general options such as name, font, show menubar, terminal bell.

Title and Command: Give this profile an initial title and run custom commands (such as automatically listing directory contents when a profile is opened.)

Colors: Foreground and background colors.

Background: Configure a background image or window transparency.

Scrolling: Place the scroll bar and define how far back it will scroll.

Compatibility: Configure the backspace and delete keys.

Final thoughts

I have used many terminals in my day, but the gnome-terminal is one of the finest. Not only is it very compatible, it is useful and user-friendly. If you use the GNOME desktop (or an alternative desktop), make sure you get to know gnome-terminal for all your command line goodness.

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In this article we will cover the cdrecord and dd commands where we will burn ISO images, data backups, and audio CDs.

Installing cdrecord and dd

By default, cdrecord and dd, should be installed. If not you can find it in your Add/Remove Software utility by searching for “cdrecord” and “dd”. Once you have installed the applications open up a terminal window and get ready.

The first thing you need to do is to determine where your device is located. To locate your device issue the command cdrecord -scanbus. When the command runs you should see output similar to:

1000,0,0 100000) *
1000,1,0 100001) *
1000,2,0 100002) ‘HL-DT-ST’ ‘RW/DVD GCC-T10N ‘ ‘1.00′ Removable CD-ROM
1000,3,0 100003) *
1000,4,0 100004) *
1000,5,0 100005) *
1000,6,0 100006) *
1000,7,0 100007) *
As you can see above, my device is listed. The listing information I take out of this is 0,2,0. If your scanbus reports the number before the first “,” as a 1000 you will only want the last digit – in my case a 0. If scanbus reports only a 0 before the first “,” that will be your first number in your device location. So my device is 0,2,0.

This device address will be plugged into the command for burning in conjunction with the dev= argument.

Burning ISO image

You have data on a CD that you want turned into an ISO image. This could be a Linux distribution or anything. To do this you would issue the command:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=ISO_file.iso

Where /dev/cdrom is the location of your CD device and ISO_file.iso name of the ISO image you want to create. NOTE: If you are wanting to put the ISO image file in a location other than where you are issuing the command, use the full path to the file name.

You can also make use of the mkisofs command to create ISO images of directories on your hard drive. The command for this would look like:

mkisofs -o Directory.iso Directory

Now let’s burn that ISO image to a CD. To do this issue a command similar to:

cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -data speed=48 ISO_file.iso

The above command would put the ISO_file.iso file onto a burnable CD. If you know the actual burning speed of your device you can make adjustments to the command above.

Burn Audio CDs

What everyone has been waiting for. How to burn audio CDs. You could easily burn a directory full of .wav files with the command:

cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -eject speed=48 -pad -audio *.wav

But let’s take this one step further and create a handy bash script that will do the following:

Convert spaces in file names to underscores.

Convert .mp3 files to .wav files.

Burn all .wav files to cd.

Here is the script:

#!/bin/sh

# Convert spaces to underscores
for i in *.mp3; do mv “$i” `echo $i | tr ‘ ‘ ‘_’`; done

# Convert MP3 files to WAV files
for i in *.mp3; do mpg123 -w `basename $i .mp3`.wav $i; done

# Burn the CD
cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -eject speed=48 -pad -audio *.wav

Once you have created the script, make sure you chmod the file so it is executable like this:

chmod u+x burn_script

To run the script first move it into the directory that contains your mp3 files and issue the command ./burn_script. Or you can copy the burn_script to /usr/bin so it is a global command.

Final Thoughts

Linux is an incredibly flexible operating system. The ability to burn CDs from the command line proves just how flexible it is. Do you have other tricks you like to use along these lines? If so, share them.

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One interesting aspect of winsat.exe is that it can also be launched under Windows XP. It provides the same functionality on that operating system with the exception of the Windows Experience Engine. What you basically get is a benchmarking tool for your computer system developed by Microsoft.

The tool has to be acquired before it becomes available in Windows XP. The easiest way to do that is to download the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor 1.0 and extract the installation package with the Universal Extractor or a similar tool that is capable of that. The other possibility would be to install the Upgrade Advisor and look into the program directory afterwards.

Winsat.exe can then be launched from the command line. The basic parameter that is providing details about arguments is winsat -?. The main assessments are cpu, disk, mem, dwm, d3d, media and mfmedia which somethings require additional switches.

The switches are not outlined in the help documentation. They are however available at the Technet Library page.

The winsat mem command supports 14 switches. Here are a few examples of what you can do with the Windows System Assessment Tool:

The following example assesses CPU performance using 256-bit AES cryptographic algorithms:

winsat cpu -encryption

Measuring read speed of a local drive:

winsat disk -read -ran -drive c

How can this benchmark aid the user? It could for instance help to determine the best location for a cache by comparing the write and read speed of all hard drives and external drives. It can also be used to measure the speed of old or new computer memory.

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ClipCopy is a portable software for the command line that can easily be used to copy output directly to the Windows clipboard. The easiest way to use the software is by appending it to the command issued. To copy the output with Clipcopy one would simply use the command dir | clipcopy

The output size is not limited which means that it can copy large amounts of data to the Windows clipboard easily. The command will not echo the dir command in the command line. Clipcopy provides an option to do both. This is done by appending the -e parameter to the command. The full command would be dir | clipcopy -e for that.

It is also possible to output clipboard contents to the command line with clipcopy -g which can also be combined with the command to output the clipboard to a file with clipcopy -g > file.txt.

Lastly there is the option to output text to the clipboard with clipcopy text.

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Only one line of code is needed to join multiple mp3 files: copy /b *.mp3 c:\new.mp3. That’s all there is needed. The /b parameter ensures that the files are copied in binary format. *.mp3 defines the source directory of the files. You can easily add a drive and folder structure in front. The wildcard * defines that all mp3 will be joined alphanumerically by the command. It is possible to limit the files by adding letters or numbers to the command, e.g. m*.mp3 to join all mp3 starting with the letter m.

The last part c:\mp3 defines the target directory for the newly created file as well as its name. A possibility to join files with different filenames is also available. Simply use the command copy /b file1.mp3 + aaa.mp3 + r3f.mp3 c:\new.mp3 for this. You may use wildcards as well for the process.

Several applications like Audacity can also be used to merge music files. Mp3 Direct Cut is another one for the purpose.

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Wherever Change Directory (WCD via Download Squad) is the name of a Windows script that is offering a way to change directories in the Windows command line blazingly fast. It indexes the directory structure of the computer system at first start of the application which takes a few seconds. After that it is possible to change directories with the command wcd directory, for example wcd desktop. The default search is to look for every directory name that begins with the search term that the user entered. Wildcards can be used to change that behavior.

WCD will display all directories with desktop in their name giving the user the option to pick one to change to. If only one directory with the name was found on the system WCD will immediately make the directory change.

Wherever Change Directory supports local directories, Windows LAN UNC paths, alias directories and subdirectories.

A user who has the intention to work regularly with the software program should either move it into a system path directory or add the new directory to the system path to be able to run wcd from every location and not only its source directory.

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CmdCapture is a small command line tool that can make screenshots of the current command line. Since it is a command line tool it is driven by parameters which are explained when entering CmdCapture.exe /h.

The easiest way to create a screenshot of the command line is to run the application without parameters. It will save a screenshot in the same directory in png format with the date and time attached to the filename.

Three additional parameters are supported by the software. The parameter /f can be used to pick a custom filename and file extension. Supported are png, jpg, bmp, tif and xpm.

The /d parameter can be used to specify another directory for the created screenshots. Finally the /q parameter changes the jpg quality level which makes only sense if jpg is used as the file format.

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Console 2 tries to be a better command line in Windows by migrating the command line into the modern age. It introduces tabbed browsing, transparency, layout changes and several other functions that increase productivity. Most of the new features can be configured in the settings of Console 2.

Tabbed browsing on the other hand is available from the main toolbar. The settings are divided into several categories like tabs, appearance and behavior. A new font – including font size, format, color and smoothing – can be defined in the appearance menu together with transparency settings and features like snapping to desktop edges when the window is moved.

The functionality of Console 2 is exactly the same that the default Windows command line offers which means that the changes are mostly cosmetic changes that do increase productivity. The most important additions in my opinion are the selection of additional fonts, the transparency and the tabbed browsing.

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A list of commands is accessible by entering ls into the form field. I think an example will illustrate the strength of yubnub; wp ghacks searches wikipedia for the term ghacks, gim ghacks searches google images for ghacks. y or g searches yahoo or google for a selected search term. That is not all of course. AM title searches amazon for the title that you enter, random 1000 returns a random number between 1 and 1000.

A good selection of commands that should be useful for most users are Jeremy’s Picks which displays a list of about 100 commands. It is possible to create your own commands. You do select a command string that is not used yet and select a url that uses variables to perform searches or operations. One example would be http://images.google.com/images?q=%s which is simply the search string for google images.

The search string that is entered is substituted with %s in this example. It is possible to create more advanced searches  with more than one parameters.

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You are able to define macros in the tool itself, the author provides for example a macro for a google and wikipedia search on his website. After the macro is in place you can perform google searches by typing “g searchstring” in the command line tool. Macros can be added for other services as well of course. You can select that Mikes Command Line tool stays minimized in the system tray until you activate it by hot key or clicking it. The other options are always on top and a normal window behaviour.

One final feature is that Mikes Command Line supports plugins, the author offers a plugin sdk on his website and some plugins that have already been created. You will be able to control winamp, log off, shut down and restart windows, empty the recycle bin or the recent documents folder, browse the file structure of your computer and extend the macro functionality to add automatic actions like clicks and keystrokes to it.

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