System

Nu offers many commands and plugins that help navigate a command-line interface, interface with the filesystem, and monitor your system.

View all files in the current directory

  1. > ls | where type == file

Output

  1. ────┬─────────────────────────────────┬──────┬──────────┬────────────────
  2.  #  │              name               │ type │   size   │    modified
  3. ────┼─────────────────────────────────┼──────┼──────────┼────────────────
  4.   0 │ CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md              │ file │   3.5 KB │ 10 months ago
  5.   1 │ CONTRIBUTING.md                 │ file │   1.8 KB │ 10 months ago
  6.   2 │ Cargo.lock                      │ file │ 118.4 KB │ 2 hours ago
  7.   3 │ Cargo.toml                      │ file │   4.1 KB │ 2 hours ago
  8.   4 │ Cargo.toml.old                  │ file │   7.2 KB │ 2 weeks ago
  9.   5 │ LICENSE                         │ file │   1.1 KB │ 4 months ago
  10.   6 │ Makefile.toml                   │ file │    473 B │ 10 months ago
  11.   7 │ README.build.txt                │ file │    193 B │ 10 months ago
  12.   8 │ README.md                       │ file │  15.8 KB │ 3 days ago
  13.   9 │ bands.txt                       │ file │    156 B │ 2 hours ago
  14.  10 │ extra_features_cargo_install.sh │ file │     54 B │ 4 months ago
  15.  11 │ files                           │ file │      3 B │ an hour ago
  16.  12 │ payload.json                    │ file │     88 B │ 21 minutes ago
  17.  13 │ rustfmt.toml                    │ file │     16 B │ 10 months ago
  18.  14 │ urls.json                       │ file │    182 B │ 25 minutes ago
  19. ────┴─────────────────────────────────┴──────┴──────────┴────────────────

View all directories in the current directory

  1. > ls | where type == dir

Output

  1. ────┬───────────┬──────┬─────────┬───────────────
  2.  #  │   name    │ type │  size   │   modified
  3. ────┼───────────┼──────┼─────────┼───────────────
  4.   0 │ .azureold │ dir  │     0 B │ 3 weeks ago
  5.   1 │ .cargo    │ dir  │     0 B │ 10 months ago
  6.   2 │ .vscode   │ dir  │     0 B │ 10 months ago
  7.   3 │ crates    │ dir  │ 12.3 KB │ 3 weeks ago
  8.   4 │ docs      │ dir  │  4.1 KB │ a day ago
  9.   5 │ images    │ dir  │  4.1 KB │ 2 weeks ago
  10.   6 │ pkg_mgrs  │ dir  │     0 B │ 10 months ago
  11.   7 │ samples   │ dir  │     0 B │ 10 months ago
  12.   8 │ src       │ dir  │  4.1 KB │ 3 hours ago
  13.   9 │ target    │ dir  │     0 B │ 2 weeks ago
  14.  10 │ tests     │ dir  │     0 B │ 4 months ago
  15.  11 │ wix       │ dir  │     0 B │ 2 weeks ago
  16. ────┴───────────┴──────┴─────────┴───────────────

Find processes sorted by greatest cpu utilization.

  1. > ps | where cpu > 0 | sort-by cpu | reverse

Output

  1. ───┬───────┬────────────────────┬───────┬─────────┬─────────
  2.  # │  pid  │        name        │  cpu  │   mem   │ virtual
  3. ───┼───────┼────────────────────┼───────┼─────────┼─────────
  4.  0 │ 11928 │ nu.exe             │ 32.12 │ 47.7 MB │ 20.9 MB
  5.  1 │ 11728 │ Teams.exe          │ 10.71 │ 53.8 MB │ 50.8 MB
  6.  2 │ 21460 │ msedgewebview2.exe │  8.43 │ 54.0 MB │ 36.8 MB
  7. ───┴───────┴────────────────────┴───────┴─────────┴─────────

Find and kill a hanging process

Sometimes a process doesn’t shut down correctly. Using ps it’s fairly easy to find the pid of this process.

  1. > ps | where name == Notepad2.exe

Output

  1. ───┬──────┬──────────────┬──────┬─────────┬─────────
  2.  # │ pid  │     name     │ cpu  │   mem   │ virtual
  3. ───┼──────┼──────────────┼──────┼─────────┼─────────
  4.  0 │ 9268 │ Notepad2.exe │ 0.00 │ 32.0 MB │  9.8 MB
  5. ───┴──────┴──────────────┴──────┴─────────┴─────────

This process can be sent the kill signal in a one-liner:

  1. > ps | where name == Notepad2.exe | get pid.0 | kill -9 $in

Output

  1. ───┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  2.  0 │ SUCCESS: Sent termination signal to the process with PID 9268.
  3. ───┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Notes:

  • kill is Linux/Unix specific command, it is not built-in to nu.
  • filtering with the where command, as shown above, is case-sensitive.

Pipeline content to clipboard

Note: clip/clipboard-cli is has not been ported yet in the new version

Add the output of a pipeline to your clipboard. Note, this currently needs to be string output.

Note that clip is not yet enabled by default. If the output of version | get features contains clipboard-cli then your copy of NuShell contains clip. If clip is not available, then your operating system may provide a command that performs a similar function e.g. clip on Windows or pbcopy on macOS.

  1. sys | get mem | to json | clip

Output pasted from clip 😃

  1. {
  2.   "total": 34047156000,
  3.   "free": 19571089000,
  4.   "swap total": 7516192000,
  5.   "swap free": 7516192000
  6. }