When working with multiple panes, it's convenient to use the tmux copy mode (ctrl+b [) to be able to use pane-aware copying. However, copy mode copies into a tmux copy buffer, rather than into the system clipboard. Ideally, I would like a copy to automatically copy into the system clipboard too.
A basic starting point was to add this alias to my bashrc:
alias tmux2clip='tmux save-buffer - | xsel -i -b' (on linux, requires xsel to be installed)
alias tmux2clip='tmux save-buffer - | pbcopy' (on macos)
After I copy using copy mode, I run the alias and the text gets copied into my clipboard! Works like a charm, but always requires that one extra manual step.
It would be ideal, if that alias can trigger as a kind of "post tmux copy hook" that I configure in tmux.
The best thing I could come up with is this line in my ~/.tmux.conf:
bind-key -T copy-mode MouseDragEnd1Pane send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xsel -i -b"
# similarly, I believe only needed for keyboard based copies:
bind-key -T copy-mode C-w send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xsel -i -b"
bind-key -T copy-mode M-w send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xsel -i -b"
This causes any mouse based selection (note: I prefer mouse selection over keyboard based selections) to trigger a copy of that selection into my system clipboard. The annoying thing is though, that it will always happen, i.e. not only in copy mode, just anytime I select something it happens. This turns out to be quite sensitive in practice, just clicking the window with my mouse to give it focus often already accidentally triggers a small selection (often accidentally overwriting existing content in my clipboard, causing me to sometimes paste completely different stuff than intended).
I searched many similar questions but haven't been able to find any satisfying answers. I would really hope to find a way to get a kind of "post tmux copy hook" where I can insert my copy-to-clipboard command.
I use Ubuntu 18.04, with tmux 2.6. Please also be aware that I use mouse mode in my ~/.tmux.conf:
set -g mouse on
Any help would be highly appreciated. I've been wanting this for many months now already, and all of my revived efforts have only led to lost time :(
If you don't want tmux to enter copy mode when you drag on the pane, then unbind MouseDrag1Pane in the root table (unbind -n MouseDrag1Pane).
Is there a way to show the command which is currently running at a tmux pane?
I tried 'history', but it does not seem to show the commands which I had executed at tmux.
I also tried 'ps -ef', but it does not show the full command in the case like "./a.sh ; ./b.sh"
I found several answers online that include ps ... | tail -1. Unfortunately, these don't always work because sometimes the order of the commands is swapped, e.g. for two separate panes I get:
$ ps -t /dev/pts/12 -o args=
-bash
mpv some_movie.mp4
$ ps -t /dev/pts/10 -o args=
micro some_file.txt
-bash
I really wanted a single line of output so that I could show it in the status bar, but what I ultimately ended up going with is ps --forest via run-shell. It seems to always reliably show the correct order and with more information should there be nested commands running (e.g. via a bash script). Its output looks like:
$ ps --forest -o args -g $$
COMMAND
-bash
\_ ps --forest -o args -g 1695
Solution
So in my .tmux.conf, I've got:
bind '`' run-shell 'ps --forest -o pid,args -g #{pane_pid}'
It will replace the contents of your pane with the output from the ps --forest command. Once you type esc or ^C, the ps output disappears, and your pane goes back to whatever it was doing :) Ends up looking like:
running script.sh, which calls other-script.sh, which sleeps for 30s
viewing pane process tree via keybinding
(Old question but for future reference)
Try: tmux list-panes -t <your_pane_name> -F '#{pane_current_command}'
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#FORMATS
Try setting pane-border-status to bottom or top in your configuration file, with the tmux command prompt or just running tmux set pane-border-status bottom. Borders should appear around the panes and info about the current process appears much like in a regular terminal window's title bar.
I suspect the command wasn't written to the history file as the shell with the stuck/long-running job wasn't done yet.
You might try pstree -U to see process in their parent/child tree.
I am using ipmitool to get remote console output with SOL. This gets called from within a background process. When I call it in the foreground, it correctly logs the console output to the log file. But when called in the background, ipmitool doesn't work. Any idea why ?
ipmitool write the SOL data on the standout output(stdout) file descriptor. When called in background, ipmitool can't write to stdout because of which you are not seeing console logs.
If you want to run it as a background process, then redirect the stdout to a file and tail that file.
I had this issue. Solution of redirecting stdout was not enough.
This ended up working:
tail -f /dev/null --pid="$$" \
| ipmitool -H "$ip" -U "$username" -P "$password" -I lanplus sol activate \
2>> stderr.txt >> stdout.txt &
Idea of using tail -f /dev/null came form this answer. There are a few other solutions listed there, but I didn't try them.
--pid="$$" means this process will get killed when parent process gets killed, which is what I wanted, but may or may not fit your needs. You will probably need some mechanism for avoiding tail -f zombies.
There are many things that all programmers should know, but I am particularly interested in the Unix/Linux commands that we should all know. For accomplishing tasks that we may come up against at some point such as refactoring, reporting, network updates etc.
The reason I am curious is because having previously worked as a software tester at a software company while I am studying my degree, I noticed that all of developers (who were developing Windows software) had 2 computers.
To their left was their Windows XP development machine, and to the right was a Linux box. I think it was Ubuntu. Anyway they told me that they used it because it provided powerful unix operations that Windows couldn't do in their development process.
This makes me curious to know, as a software engineer what do you believe are some of the most powerful scripts/commands/uses that you can perform on a Unix/Linux operating system that every programmer should know for solving real world tasks that may not necessarily relate to writing code?
We all know what sed, awk and grep do. I am interested in some actual Unix/Linux scripting pieces that have solved a difficult problem for you, so that other programmers may benefit. Please provide your story and source.
I am sure there are numerous examples like this that people keep in their 'Scripts' folder.
Update: People seem to be misinterpreting the question. I am not asking for the names of individual unix commands, rather UNIX code snippets that have solved a problem for you.
Best answers from the Community
Traverse a directory tree and print out paths to any files that match a regular expression:
find . -exec grep -l -e 'myregex' {} \; >> outfile.txt
Invoke the default editor(Nano/ViM)
(works on most Unix systems including Mac OS X)
Default editor is whatever your
"EDITOR" environment variable is
set to. ie: export
EDITOR=/usr/bin/pico which is
located at ~/.profile under Mac OS
X.
Ctrl+x Ctrl+e
List all running network connections (including which app they belong to)
lsof -i -nP
Clear the Terminal's search history (Another of my favourites)
history -c
I find commandlinefu.com to be an excellent resource for various shell scripting recipes.
Examples
Common
# Run the last command as root
sudo !!
# Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command
ctrl-x ctrl-e
# Execute a command at a given time
echo "ls -l" | at midnight
Esoteric
# output your microphone to a remote computer's speaker
dd if=/dev/dsp | ssh -c arcfour -C username#host dd of=/dev/dsp
How to exit VI
:wq
Saves the file and ends the misery.
Alternative of ":wq" is ":x" to save and close the vi editor.
grep
awk
sed
perl
find
A lot of Unix power comes from its ability to manipulate text files and filter data. Of course, you can get all of these commands for Windows. They are just not native in the OS, like they are in Unix.
and the ability to chain commands together with pipes etc. This can create extremely powerful single lines of commands from simple functions.
Your shell is the most powerful tool you have available
being able to write simple loops etc
understanding file globbing (e.g. *.java etc.)
being able to put together commands via pipes, subshells. redirection etc.
Having that level of shell knowledge allows you to do enormous amounts on the command line, without having to record info via temporary text files, copy/paste etc., and to leverage off the huge number of utility programs that permit slicing/dicing of data.
Unix Power Tools will show you so much of this. Every time I open my copy I find something new.
I use this so much I am actually ashamed of myself. Remove spaces from all filenames and replace them with an underscore:
[removespaces.sh]
#!/bin/bash
find . -type f -name "* *" | while read file
do
mv "$file" "${file// /_}"
done
My personal favorite is the lsof command.
"lsof" can be used to list opened file descriptors, sockets, and pipes.
I find it extremely useful when trying to figure out which processes have used which ports/files on my machine.
Example: List all internet connections without hostname resolution and without port to port name conversion.
lsof -i -nP
http://www.manpagez.com/man/8/lsof/
If you make a typo in a long command, you can rerun the command with a substitution (in bash):
mkdir ~/aewseomeDirectory
you can see that "awesome" is mispelled, you can type the following to re run the command with the typo corrected
^aew^awe
it then outputs what it substituted (mkdir ~/aweseomeDirectory) and runs the command. (don't forget to undo the damage you did with the incorrect command!)
The tr command is the most under-appreciated command in Unix:
#Convert all input to upper case
ls | tr a-z A-Z
#take the output and put into a single line
ls | tr "\n" " "
#get rid of all numbers
ls -lt | tr -d 0-9
When solving problems on faulty linux boxes, by far the most common key sequence I type end up typing is alt+sysrq R E I S U B
The power of this tools (grep find, awk, sed) comes from their versatility, so giving a particular case seems quite useless.
man is the most powerful comand, because then you can understand what you type instead of just blindly copy pasting from stack overflow.
Example are welcome, but there are already topics for tis.
My most used :
grep something_to_find * -R
which can be replaced by ack and
find | xargs
find with results piped into xargs can be very powerful
some of you might disagree with me, but nevertheless, here's something to talk about. If one learns gawk ( other variants as well) throughly, one can skip learning and using grep/sed/wc/cut/paste and a few other *nix tools. all you need is one good tool to do the job of many combined.
Some way to search (multiple) badly formatted log files, in which the search string may be found on an "orphaned" next line. For example, to display both the 1st, and a concatenated 3rd and 4th line when searching for id = 110375:
[2008-11-08 07:07:01] [INFO] ...; id = 110375; ...
[2008-11-08 07:07:02] [INFO] ...; id = 238998; ...
[2008-11-08 07:07:03] [ERROR] ... caught exception
...; id = 110375; ...
[2008-11-08 07:07:05] [INFO] ...; id = 800612; ...
I guess there must be better solutions (yes, add them...!) than the following concatenation of the two lines using sed prior to actually running grep:
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
echo "Usage: `basename $0` id"
echo "Searches all myproject's logs for the given id"
exit -1
fi
# When finding "caught exception" then append the next line into the pattern
# space bij using "N", and next replace the newline with a colon and a space
# to ensure a single line starting with a timestamp, to allow for sorting
# the output of multiple files:
ls -rt /var/www/rails/myproject/shared/log/production.* \
| xargs cat | sed '/caught exception$/N;s/\n/: /g' \
| grep "id = $1" | sort
...to yield:
[2008-11-08 07:07:01] [INFO] ...; id = 110375; ...
[2008-11-08 07:07:03] [ERROR] ... caught exception: ...; id = 110375; ...
Actually, a more generic solution would append all (possibly multiple) lines that do not start with some [timestamp] to its previous line. Anyone? Not necessarily using sed, of course.
for card in `seq 1 8` ;do
for ts in `seq 1 31` ; do
echo $card $ts >>/etc/tuni.cfg;
done
done
was better than writing the silly 248 lines of config by hand.
Neded to drop some leftover tables that all were prefixed with 'tmp'
for table in `echo show tables | mysql quotiadb |grep ^tmp` ; do
echo drop table $table
done
Review the output, rerun the loop and pipe it to mysql
Finding PIDs without the grep itself showing up
export CUPSPID=`ps -ef | grep cups | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2;}'`
Best answers from the Community
Traverse a directory tree and print out paths to any files that match a regular expression:
find . -exec grep -l -e 'myregex' {} \; >> outfile.txt
Invoke the default editor(Nano/ViM)
(works on most Unix systems including Mac OS X)
Default editor is whatever your
"EDITOR" environment variable is
set to. ie: export
EDITOR=/usr/bin/pico which is
located at ~/.profile under Mac OS
X.
Ctrl+x Ctrl+e
List all running network connections (including which app they belong to)
lsof -i -nP
Clear the Terminal's search history (Another of my favourites)
history -c
Repeat your previous command in bash using !!. I oftentimes run chown otheruser: -R /home/otheruser and forget to use sudo. If you forget sudo, using !! is a little easier than arrow-up and then home.
sudo !!
I'm also not a fan of automatically resolved hostnames and names for ports, so I keep an alias for iptables mapped to iptables -nL --line-numbers. I'm not even sure why the line numbers are hidden by default.
Finally, if you want to check if a process is listening on a port as it should, bound to the right address you can run
netstat -nlp
Then you can grep the process name or port number (-n gives you numeric).
I also love to have the aid of colors in the terminal. I like to add this to my bashrc to remind me whether I'm root without even having to read it. This actually helped me a lot, I never forget sudo anymore.
red='\033[1;31m'
green='\033[1;32m'
none='\033[0m'
if [ $(id -u) -eq 0 ];
then
PS1="[\[$red\]\u\[$none\]#\H \w]$ "
else
PS1="[\[$green\]\u\[$none\]#\H \w]$ "
fi
Those are all very simple commands, but I use them a lot. Most of them even deserved an alias on my machines.
Grep (try Windows Grep)
sed (try Sed for Windows)
In fact, there's a great set of ports of really useful *nix commands available at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/. If you have a *nix background and now use windows, you should probably check them out.
You would be better of if you keep a cheatsheet with you... there is no single command that can be termed most useful. If a perticular command does your job its useful and powerful
Edit you want powerful shell scripts? shell scripts are programs. Get the basics right, build on individual commands and youll get what is called a powerful script. The one that serves your need is powerful otherwise its useless. It would have been better had you mentioned a problem and asked how to solve it.
Sort of an aside, but you can get powershell on windows. Its really powerful and can do a lot of the *nix type stuff. One cool difference is that you work with .net objects instead of text which can be useful if you're using the pipeline for filtering etc.
Alternatively, if you don't need the .NET integration, install Cygwin on the Windows box. (And add its directory to the Windows PATH.)
The fact you can use -name and -iname multiple times in a find command was an eye opener to me.
[findplaysong.sh]
#!/bin/bash
cd ~
echo Matched...
find /home/musicuser/Music/ -type f -iname "*$1*" -iname "*$2*" -exec echo {} \;
echo Sleeping 5 seconds
sleep 5
find /home/musicuser/Music/ -type f -iname "*$1*" -iname "*$2*" -exec mplayer {} \;
exit
When things work on one server but are broken on another the following lets you compare all the related libraries:
export MYLIST=`ldd amule | awk ' { print $3; }'`; for a in $MYLIST; do cksum $a; done
Compare this list with the one between the machines and you can isolate differences quickly.
To run in parallel several processes without overloading too much the machine (in a multiprocessor architecture):
NP=`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l`
#your loop here
if [ `jobs | wc -l` -gt $NP ];
then
wait
fi
launch_your_task_in_background&
#finish your loop here
Start all WebService(s)
find -iname '*weservice*'|xargs -I {} service {} restart
Search a local class in java subdirectory
find -iname '*.java'|xargs grep 'class Pool'
Find all items from file recursivly in subdirectories of current path:
cat searches.txt| xargs -I {} -d, -n 1 grep -r {}
P.S searches.txt: first,second,third, ... ,million
:() { :|: &} ;:
Fork Bomb without root access.
Try it on your own risk.
You can do anything with this...
gcc