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

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions
I often forget to sudo before editing a file I don't have write permissions on. When you come to save that file and get the infamous "E212: Can't open file for writing", just issue that vim command in order to save the file without the need to save it to a temp file and then copy it back again.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Generate MD5 hash for a string

Find the cover image for an album
This bash function uses albumart.org to find the cover for an album. It returns an amazon.com url to the image. Usage: albumart [artist] [album] These arguments can be reversed and if the album name is distinct enough, it may be possible to omit the artist. The command can be extended with wget to automatically download the matching image like this: $ albumart(){ local x y="$@";x=$(awk '/View larger image/{gsub(/^.*largeImagePopup\(.|., .*$/,"");print;exit}'

Get info about remote host ports and OS detection
Where < target > may be a single IP, a hostname or a subnet -sS TCP SYN scanning (also known as half-open, or stealth scanning) -P0 option allows you to switch off ICMP pings. -sV option enables version detection -O flag attempt to identify the remote operating system Other option: -A option enables both OS fingerprinting and version detection -v use -v twice for more verbosity. $ nmap -sS -P0 -A -v < target >

Copy your ssh public key to a server from a machine that doesn't have ssh-copy-id
This one is a bit more robust -- the remote machine may not have an .ssh directory, and it may not have an authorized_keys file, but if it does already, and you want to replace your ssh public key for some reason, this will work in that case as well, without duplicating the entry.

Inserts the results of an autocompletion in the command line
Pressing ESC then * will insert in the command line the results of the autocompletion. It's hard to explain but if you look the sample output or do $ echo ESC * you will understand quickly. By the way, few reminders about ESC : - Hold ESC does the same thing as tab tab - 'ESC .' inserts the last argument of last command (can be done many times in order to get the last argument of all previous commands)

Bash: escape '-' character in filename

Create sqlite db and store image
Creates a simple sqlite db (img.db) inserts /tmp/Q.jpg on base64 an recorvers it as /tmp/W.jpg

mount an iso
mounts an ISO file to a directory on the target file system


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: