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

Which Twitter user are you?
This will tell you which twitter user you are chronologically. For example, a number of 500 means you were the 500th user to create a twitter account.

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.

Exclude inserting a table from a sql import
Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

quick integer CPU benchmark
This is a quick and dirty way to generate a (non-floating-point) CPU-bound task to benchmark. Adjust "20" to higher or lower values, as needed. As a benchmark this is probably a little less bogus than bogomips, and it will run anywhere 'bc' does.

a function to create a box of '=' characters around a given string.
First argument: string to put a box around. Second argument: character to use for box (default is '=') Same as command #4948, but shorter, and without the utility function.

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"

Search recursively to find a word or phrase in certain file types, such as C code
ack search recursively by default

Get a BOFH excuse
Almost same output with fewer typing... OP had a great idea : BOFH !!!

How to stop MAC Address via IPTables
edit the /etc/sysconfig/iptables file and try to work whit this: -A INPUT -i (interface) -m mac (mac address) -j ACCEPT/DROP

list files recursively by size


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: