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

Print with tabular

Find the package that installed a command

encode a text to url_encoded format
usefull for posts via wget

Bruteforce dm-crypt using shell expansion
Lost your luks passphrase? You can always bruteforce from the command line. See the sample output, a simple command for the "pass" word, using combinations of upper/lowercase or number replacement. The generated combinations are: for a in {p,P}{a,A,4}{s,S,5}{s,S,5}; do echo $a; done pass pasS pas5 paSs paSS paS5 ...

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"

backup delicious bookmarks
Useful script to backup all your delicious bookmarks. With decilicious shutting down soon , it could be useful

Count threads of a jvm process
if you have problem threads problem in tomcat

Read and write to TCP or UDP sockets with common bash tools
Ever needed to test firewalls but didn't have netcat, telnet or even FTP? Enter /dev/tcp, your new best friend. /dev/tcp/(hostname)/(port) is a bash builtin that bash can use to open connections to TCP and UDP ports. This one-liner opens a connection on a port to a server and lets you read and write to it from the terminal. How it works: First, exec sets up a redirect for /dev/tcp/$server/$port to file descriptor 5. Then, as per some excellent feedback from @flatcap, we launch a redirect from file descriptor 5 to STDOUT and send that to the background (which is what causes the PID to be printed when the commands are run), and then redirect STDIN to file descriptor 5 with the second cat. Finally, when the second cat dies (the connection is closed), we clean up the file descriptor with 'exec 5>&-'. It can be used to test FTP, HTTP, NTP, or can connect to netcat listening on a port (makes for a simple chat client!) Replace /tcp/ with /udp/ to use UDP instead.

Display text as though it is being typed out in real time
Pipe Viewer allows you to monitor the progress of a data transfer or command, or to show the time elapsed, among other things. In this use, it limits the transfer rate of the echo command to 10 bytes per second, making your text appear to be typed out in real time as in Hollywood movies. Fun!

Create a new file


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: