All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

Recursively compare two directories and output their differences on a readable format

Add Password Protection to a file your editing in vim.
While I love gpg and truecrypt there's some times when you just want to edit a file and not worry about keys or having to deal needing extra software on hand. Thus, you can use vim's encrypted file format. For more info on vim's encrypted files visit: http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/editing.html#encryption

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

list files by testing the ownership
Alternative to mnikhil's ls/awk solution

Learn the difference between single and double quotes

Show the UUID of a filesystem or partition
Show the UUID-based alternate device names of ZEVO-related partitions on Darwin/OS X. Adapted from the lines by dbrady at http://zevo.getgreenbytes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=700#p700 and following the disk device naming scheme at http://zevo.getgreenbytes.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Site.DiskDeviceNames

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files
Backups all MySQL databases to individual files. Can be put into a script that grabs current date so you have per day backups.

alias to close terminal with :q
Put this in your ~/.bashrc file (or the equivalent) If you use vim a lot, this alias will be immediately obvious. Your brain will thank you.

Say something out loud
Whatever arguments you pass will be spoken out loud. (Put it in a script or shell function.)

Find the package that installed a command


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: