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

Copy a file using dd and watch its progress
This is a more accurate way to watch the progress of a dd process. The $DDPID=$! is needed so that you don't get the PID of the sleep. The sleep 1 is needed because in my testing at least, if you run kill -USR1 against dd too quickly, it will kill it off instead of display the status. So you need to wait a second, probably so that it can configure itself to trap the USR1 signal.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Find the package that installed a command

Perl One Liner to Generate a Random IP Address
A bash version.

Use bash history with process substitution
Bash has a great history system of its commands accessed by the ! built-in history expansion operator (documented elsewhere on this site or on the web). You can combine the ! operator inside the process redirection

Mount a disk image (dmg) file in Mac OSX
To unmount, replace "attach" with "eject"

Brute force discover
Show the number of failed tries of login per account. If the user does not exist it is marked with *.

Get information about libraries currently installed on a system.
This command is very helpful when we need to duplicate a test scenario and first we want to find out the installed libraries together with the version and release numbers and architecture. (look example) Command can be tuned by choosing just the names of libraries we are interested in. For example glibc and gcc.

Show what PID is listening on port 80 on Linux

convert from decimal to hexadecimal


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: