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

View any already in progress copy command in detail
If you spot a dubious looking cp command running you can use this command to view what is being copied and to where. 1234 is the PID of the cp command being passed to the lsof utility. 3r.*REG will display the file/directory that is being read/copied. 4w.*REG will display the destination it is being written to.

Make redirects to localhost via /etc/hosts more interesting
Normally when a site is blocked through /etc/hosts, traffic is just being redirected to a non-existent server that isn't going to respond. This helps get your point across a little more clearly than a browser timeout. Of course you could use any number of codes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes Obviously, this command can be added to init-rc.d, and more sophisticated responses can be given. Seems noteworthy to mention that the information sent from the browser can be parsed using the bash READ builtin (such as 'while read -t 1 statement; do parsing'), and the connection stays open until the script exits. Take care that you must use EXEC:'bash -c foo.sh', as 'execvp' (socat's method for executing scripts) invokes 'sh', not 'bash'.

Scan for new SCSI devices
Issues a scan command on the given scsi host adapter (ex. a fibre channel adapter, in the example above on host0). Output can be watched in the messages log or in "dmesg"

Testing php configuration

DELETE all those duplicate files but one based on md5 hash comparision in the current directory tree
This one-liner will the *delete* without any further confirmation all 100% duplicates but one based on their md5 hash in the current directory tree (i.e including files in its subdirectories). Good for cleaning up collections of mp3 files or pictures of your dog|cat|kids|wife being present in gazillion incarnations on hd. md5sum can be substituted with sha1sum without problems. The actual filename is not taken into account-just the hash is used. Whatever sort thinks is the first filename is kept. It is assumed that the filename does not contain 0x00. As per the good suggestion in the first comment, this one does a hard link instead: $ find . -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | perl -ne 'chomp; $ph=$h; ($h,$f)=split(/\s+/,$_,2); if ($h ne $ph) { $k = $f; } else { unlink($f); link($k, $f); }'

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Convert seconds to human-readable format
This example, for example, produces the output, "Fri Feb 13 15:26:30 EST 2009"

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

change up n directories
Change n directories up, without parameters change one up

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"


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: