All commands

All commands (14,187)

sorted by

List all symbolic links in current directory

For those who don't have the symlinks command, you can use readlink. This command is not straightforward because readlink is very picky. The backslash in front of 'ls' means not to use an alias (e.g. color escape codes from an aliased 'ls' could mess up readlink), and the -1 (one) means to print the entries separated by newlines. xargs -l (the letter L) means to process each input separated by newlines as separate commands.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
2

\ls -1 | xargs -l readlink

TeacherTiger · 2009-11-23 19:28:03 7
Find all dot files and directories

In most modern shells, printf is a builtin command.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

printf "%s\n" .*

cfajohnson · 2009-11-23 18:07:18 3
List all symbolic links in current directory
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

ls -F | sed -n 's/@$//p'

putnamhill · 2009-11-23 16:46:58 5
List the biggest accessible files/dirs in current directory, sorted
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

du -ms * 2>/dev/null |sort -nr|head

yooreck · 2009-11-23 16:06:40 3
List all symbolic links in current directory

ls -l may vary depending on operating system, so "print $8" may have to be changed
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-3

ls -l `ls -l |awk '/^l/ {print $8}'`

yooreck · 2009-11-23 16:02:18 3
Find all dot files and directories
This is sample output - yours may be different.
2

ls -d .*

yooreck · 2009-11-23 15:58:52 4
Mount a Windows share on the local network (Ubuntu) with user rights and use a specific samba user
This is sample output - yours may be different.
7

sudo mount -t cifs -o user,username="samba username" //$ip_or_host/$sharename /mnt

ludogomez · 2009-11-23 15:26:23 8
Debian Runlevel configuration tool

This tool configures system services in connection with system runlevels. It turns on/off services using the scripts in /etc/init.d/. Rcconf works with System-V style runlevel configuration. It is a TUI(Text User Interface) frontend to the update-rc.d command.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

rcconf

tiagofischer · 2009-11-23 14:32:43 5
Make all GUI stuff show up on the display connected to the computer (when you're logged in via SSH)

If you have multiple displays or monitors the DISPLAY environment variable will tell X where to send the output. This is very handy for setting up a mediacenter at home. You can plugin the computer to the TV and then ssh to the computer and set the DISPLAY as above, then run your program and it will show up on the TV.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

DISPLAY=:0.0; export DISPLAY

sb · 2009-11-23 14:28:39 3
Mount a Windows share on the local network (Ubuntu)

Mount a Windows share. Usually the IP is needed for the $ip_or_host option. Getting hostnames working on a local network never seems to work.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

sudo mount -t cifs //$ip_or_host/$sharename /mnt

sb · 2009-11-23 14:24:02 3
Set the master volume to 90% (Ubuntu)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

aumix -v 90

sb · 2009-11-23 14:20:16 5
Locking and unlocking files and mailboxes

Programs for locking and unlocking files and mailboxes.This package includes several programs to safely lock and unlock files and mailboxes from the command line. These include: lockfile-create lockfile-remove lockfile-touchlock mail-lock mail-unlock mail-touchlock These programs use liblockfile to perform the file locking and unlocking, so they are guaranteed compatible with Debian's file locking policies.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
4

lockfile

tiagofischer · 2009-11-23 12:07:07 4
DVD to YouTube ready watermarked MPEG-4 AVI file using mencoder (step 2)

Reencodes to MPEG-4 DivX output video file from step 1. Audio stream is simply copied. Resizes to 320x240 and deinterlaces as needed. A heading subtitle file is applied as watermark. This heading subtitle file can be a URL.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
3

mencoder -sub heading.ssa -subpos 0 -subfont-text-scale 4 -utf8 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -vf scale=320:-2,expand=:240:::1 -ffourcc xvid -o output.avi dvd.avi

ivalladt · 2009-11-23 11:58:42 6
DVD to YouTube ready watermarked MPEG-4 AVI file using mencoder (step 1)

Rips DVD to lossless encoded video file. Reencodes audio to CBR MP3 for correct audio to video syncing. Be sure to have enough free disk space.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

mencoder -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr=128 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o dvd.avi dvd://0

ivalladt · 2009-11-23 11:53:30 4
extract email adresses from some file (or any other pattern)

Simply more email-adresses matched Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
hello-foo.bar-test@mail.foo-bar.com -> Match!
```
10

grep -Eio '([[:alnum:]_.-]+@[[:alnum:]_.-]+?\.[[:alpha:].]{2,6})'

fooBier · 2009-11-22 21:14:49 7
Checks apache's access_log file, strips the search queries and shoves them up your e-mail

as unixmonkey7109 pointed out, first awk parse replaces three steps.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

awk '/q=/{print $11}' /var/log/httpd/access_log.4 | awk -F 'q=' '{print $2}' | sed 's/+/ /g;s/%22/"/g;s/q=//' | cut -d "&" -f 1

isma · 2009-11-22 17:13:48 69
Checks apache's access_log file, strips the search queries and shoves them up your e-mail

It's not a big line, and it *may not* work for everybody, I guess it depends on the detail of access_log configuration in your httpd.conf. I use it as a prerotate command for logrotate in httpd section so it executes before access_log rotation, everyday at midnight.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

cat /var/log/httpd/access_log | grep q= | awk '{print $11}' | awk -F 'q=' '{print $2}' | sed 's/+/ /g;s/%22/"/g;s/q=//' | cut -d "&" -f 1 | mail youremail@isp.com -s "[your-site] search strings for `date`"

isma · 2009-11-22 03:03:06 9
Find iPod's fwguid

This is a bit of a hack, but it will get your fwguid which is needed sometimes when using your iPod. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
000A27001BB1BE3F
```
-1

lsusb -v | grep -o "[0-9A-Z]{16}"

matthewbauer · 2009-11-22 00:58:00 4
Burn a directory of mp3s to an audio cd.

This uses mpg123 to convert the files to wav before burning, but you can use mplayer or mencoder or ffmpeg or lame with the --decode option, or whatever you like.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
3

alias burnaudiocd='mkdir ./temp && for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3;do mpg123 -w "./temp/${i%%.*}.wav" "$i";done;cdrecord -pad ./temp/* && rm -r ./temp'

eightmillion · 2009-11-21 19:57:18 3
Find all dot files and directories
This is sample output - yours may be different.
6

echo .*

unixmonkey7109 · 2009-11-21 04:07:28 5
remove files and directories with acces time older than a given date

touch a dummy file with the specified date, then use find with -anewer .
This is sample output - yours may be different.
2

touch -t "YYYYMMDDhhmm.ss" dummy ; find . -anewer dummy

unixmonkey7109 · 2009-11-21 04:05:45 4
Show sorted list of files with sizes more than 1MB in the current dir

GNU find + sort
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -size +1M -printf "%f:%s\n" | sort -t":" -k2

unixmonkey7109 · 2009-11-21 03:47:39 3
Make sure a script is run in a terminal.

Exit with error if script is not run in a terminal
This is sample output - yours may be different.
21

[ -t 0 ] || exit 1

cfajohnson · 2009-11-20 23:14:49 10
Get your external IP address
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

wget -qO - http://www.sputnick-area.net/ip;echo

cfajohnson · 2009-11-20 23:10:31 4
List all available commands (bash, ksh93)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
7

printf "%s\n" ${PATH//:/\/* }

cfajohnson · 2009-11-20 22:55:59 4
‹ First < 425 426 427 428 429 > Last ›

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

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

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"

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"

Crash bash, in case you ever want to for whatever reason

This is a very hackish way to do it that I'm mainly just posting for fun, and I guess technically can more accurately be said to result in undefined behavior. What the command does is tell the shell to treat libpng like it's a shell plugin (which it's most certainly not) and attempt to install a "png_create_read" command from the library. It looks for the struct with the information about the command; since it's always the command name followed by "_struct", it'll look for a symbol called "png_create_read_struct". And it finds it, since this is the name of one of libpng's functions. But bash has no way to tell it's a function instead of a struct, so it goes ahead and parses the function's code as if it was command metadata. Inevitably, bash will attempt to dereference an invalid pointer or whatever, resulting in a segfault.

Set laptop display brightness

Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

List mp3 files with less than 320 kbps bitrate.

Grep Recursively Through Single File Extension

Trac 0.12.2-stable

Copy files for backup storage

Backup a whole directory copying only updated files.

convert unixtime to human-readable with awk

- convert unixtime to human-readable with awk - useful to read logfiles with unix-timestamps, f.e. squid-log: sudo tail -f /var/log/squid3/access.log | awk '{ print strftime("%c ", $1) $0; }

Retrieve "last modified" timestamp of web resource in UTC seconds

This command line assumes that "${url}" is the URL of the web resource. It can be useful to check the "freshness" of a download URL before a GET request.

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:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)

All commands (14,187) the last day the last week the last month all time sorted by date votes

What's this?

Check These Out

Stay in the loop…

All commands (14,187)

sorted by