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

Find all files containing a word
shorter :p

Dump snapshot of UFS2 filesystem, then gzip it
Opens a snapshot of a live UFS2 filesystem, runs dump to generate a full filesystem backup which is run through gzip. The filesystem must support snapshots and have a .snap directory in the filesystem root. To restore the backup, one can do $ zcat /path/to/adXsYz.dump.gz | restore -rf -

Rename files in batch

vi keybindings with info
Info has some of the worst keybindings I've ever seen. Being a vim user, I attribute that to emacs influence. Use the --vi-keys option to use some of the vi keybindings, although this won't change all the keybindings. Use the "infokey" program to have more control over info keybindings.

Know which version dpkg/apt considers more recent
Compares two versions with dpkg. It is not always obvious what version dpkg/apt will consider to be more recent. Operators include the following : * These treat an empty version as earlier than any version: lt le eq ne ge gt. * These treat an empty version as later than any version: lt-nl le-nl ge-nl gt-nl. * These are provided only for compatibility with control file syntax: < > >. This command doesn't output anything. It only returns with status 0 or 1, hence the echo "y" || echo "n" to get an output.

Generate MD5 of string and output only the hash checksum in a readable format
Generates the md5 hash, without the trailing " -" and with the output "broken" into pairs of hexs.

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

Edit the last or previous command line in an editor then execute
If you would like to edit a previous command, which might be long and complicated, you can use the fc (I think it stands for fix command). Invoke fc alone will edit the last command using the default editor (specified by $FCEDIT, $EDITOR, or emacs, in that order). After you make the changes in the editor, save and exit to execute that command. The fc command is more flexible than what I have described. Please 'man bash' for more information.

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.

tail: watch a filelog
-f file(s) to be monitorized -n number of last line to be printed on the screen in this example, the content of two files are displayed


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: