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

fdiff is a 'filtered diff'. Given a text filter and two inputs, will run the filter across the input files and diff the output.
Fdiff will run the command given by the first argument against the input files given as the second and third arguments, and diff the results. It will use 'diff' as the default diff program, but this can be changed by setting $DIFFCMD, e.g. $ export DIFFCMD=vimdiff; $ fdiff zcat 0716_0020005.raw.gz 0716_0030005.raw.gz ... This function will work under bash, but requires the use of command substitution, which is not available under a strict ANSI shell.

get header and footer of file for use with scalpel file carving
file carving helps if you know where the file you are looking for starts and ends. It's also an easy way to get data and catalog them for future use with forensic tools like scalpel.

mtr, better than traceroute and ping combined
mtr combines the functionality of the traceroute and ping programs in a single network diagnostic tool. As mtr starts, it investigates the network connection between the host mtr runs on and HOSTNAME. by sending packets with purposly low TTLs. It continues to send packets with low TTL, noting the response time of the intervening routers. This allows mtr to print the response percentage and response times of the internet route to HOSTNAME. A sudden increase in packetloss or response time is often an indication of a bad (or simply over‐loaded) link.

m4a to mp3 conversion with ffmpeg and lame
A batch file version of the same command would be: for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec libmp3lame -ab 256k "${f%.m4a}.mp3"; done

Show directories
Show only the subdirectories in the current directory. In the example above, /lib has 135 files and directories. With this command, the 9 dirs jump out.

Show your account and windows policy settings with Results of Policy msc.
Type this into windows via run and it will display to you your complete policy for windows. This includes group policy, security policy and your active directory account (min password etc).... www.fir3net.com

List just the executable files (or directories) in current directory
Does an 'ls' on just the files and directories in the current directory with an execute bit turned on. This version will list directories. Just tack on "-type f" to the start of the find to omit listing directories and list only files.

Get HTTP status code with curl

Terrorist threat level text

Clean apt-get and gpg cache and keys
Cleans apt-get and gpg cache and keys


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: