Function on Amit Agarwal Linux Blog

Display the history and optionally grep

Wed, 19 May 2010 16:38:47 +0000

Ever wondered how good it would be to have a command/function that would display the history or display the history with <a class="zem_slink" title="Grep" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep">grep.

Would be really good right, well someone thought about this 🙂

$ h() { if [ -z ”$1” ]; then history; else history | grep ”$@”; fi; }

Place this in your .bash_profile and you can use it two different ways. If you issue ’h’ on its own, then it acts like the history command. If you issue:

Display a block of text with delineated by a start pattern and an end pattern

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:43:41 +0000

Taken idea from commandlinefu.com

The command will display a segment from the file from the start pattern to the end pattern.

function viewsegment() { tail -n +`fgrep -n -m 1 “$1” $3 | head -`fgrep -n -m 1 “$2” $3 }
Display a block of text with delineated by a start pattern and an end pattern

View the newest xkcd comic.

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:47:07 +0000

This function displays the latest comic from xkcd.com. One of the best things about xkcd is the title text when you hover over the comic, so this function also displays that after you close the comic.

$ xkcd(){ local f=$(curl -s <a href="http://xkcd.com/">http://xkcd.com/);display $(echo "$f"|grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/[^"]+(png|jpg)');echo "$f"|awk '/<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/.?" title=./{gsub(/^.title=.|".?$/,"");print}';}

To get a random xkcd comic, I also use the following:

xkcdrandom(){ local f=$(wget -q <a href="http://dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random/">http://dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random/ -O -);display $(echo "$f"|grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/[^"]+(png|jpg)');echo "$f"|awk '/<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/.?" title=./{gsub(/^.title=.|".?$/,"");print}';}