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

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

generate random password
generate password

List the binaries installed by a Debian package
GNU grep's perl-compatible regular expression(PCRE).

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (run this command as root!)
It's the same like 'cp -p' if available. It's faster over networks than scp. If you have to copy gigs of data you could also use netcat and the tar -z option in conjunction -- on the receiving end do: # nc -l 7000 | tar -xzvpf - ...and on the sending end do: # tar -czf - * | nc otherhost 7000

Greets the user appropriately

Copy files to a remote host with SFTP with a leading dot, then rename them to the real file name
Usage: $ sftp-cp * | sftp user@host:/dir This is useful if there is a process on the remote machine waiting for files in an incoming directory. This way it won't see half-transmitted files if it ignores hidden files.

Find files with root setuids settings

View network activity of any application or user in realtime
The "-r 2" option puts lsof in repeat mode, with updates every 2 seconds. (Ctrl -c quits) The "-p" option is used to specify the application PID you want to monitor. The "-u' option can be used to keep an eye on a users network activity. "lsof -r 2 -u username -i -a"

Speed up builds and scripts, remove duplicate entries in $PATH. Users scripts are oftern bad: PATH=/apath:$PATH type of thing cause diplicate.
Thanks to the authors of: $ awk '!x[$0]++' and the author of: $ joinargs() { (local IFS="$1"; shift && echo "$*") } and others, we can have a fast Linux or android. IMPORTANT if you find a priority order problem in PATH you can push a path directory to the front without duplication as follows: $ PATH=/bin:$PATH then ... Check duplication with: $ echo $PATH|tr : '\n'|sort|uniq -d Finally do a very neat line by line list of $PATH: $ echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'} The speed up is very noticeable for android, and builds on Linux Ubantu are much faster with make and scripts. I will update the command on request. Timothy from SONY

trace http requests with tshark
trace http requests on the specified interface. uses the amazing tshark tool (http://www.wireshark.org/docs/man-pages/tshark.html)


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: