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

generate random mac address

Create md5sum of a directory

kill some pids without specific pid
pgrep, pkill - look up or signal processes based on name and other attributes

Protect directory from an overzealous rm -rf *
-R Recursively change attributes of directories and their contents. +i to set the immutable bit to prevent even root from erasing or changing the contents of a file.

Display email addresses that have been sent to by a postfix server since the last mail log rollover
This assumes your mail log is /var/log/mail.log

Lists all listening ports together with the PID of the associated process
The PID will only be printed if you're holding a root equivalent ID.

urldecode with AWK
Fast and simple awk urldecoder! Note: Parameter -n is specific to GNU awk

Temporarily ignore known SSH hosts
you may create an alias also, which I did ;-) alias sshu="ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null "

Generate a list of items from a couple of items lists A and B, getting (B - A ) set
ItemsListtoAvoid (A) could be a list of files with a special characteristic to exclude. It can be a result of previous processing list, ex. a list of files containing a special string. AlItemsList.txt (B) Is a complete list of items including some or all items in A. $Difference is saved in ItemsDifference.txt

display systemd log entries for sshd using "no-pager" (a bit like in pre-systemd: grep sshd /var/log/messages)
In pre-systemd systems, something like: "# grep sshd /var/log/messages" would display log events in /var/log/messages containing "sshd". # journalctl -u sshd --no-pager The above command displays similar results for systemd systems. (Note that this needs to be run with root permissions to access the log data.)


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: