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

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" }

Bash: escape '-' character in filename

Generate pretty secure random passwords
These are my favourite switches on pwgen: -B Don't include ambiguous characters in the password -n Include at least one number in the password -y Include at least one special symbol in the password -c Include at least one capital letter in the password It just works! Add a number to set password length, add another to set how many password to output. Example: pwgen -Bnyc 12 20 this will output 20 password of 12 chars length.

HTTP Get of a web page via proxy server with login credentials
If you are behind a proxy server and have to authenticate with proxy server to browser web pages then you have to pass proxy server address and its port number along with user credentials to curl to got GET the page using curl. Example : "curl -U srikanth -x 167.85.103.70:8080 http://www.yahoo.com". In case you don't specify the password (as in the above example), curl will prompt to enter the password at the command line.

Open Perl module source in your editor
Ever needed to look at the Perl source of an installed module on your system? This works in 90% of cases.

download newest adminer and rename to it's version accordingly
If the version already downloaded. it will not download again

Create a single-use TCP proxy with debug output to stderr
or you can add "-x" to get a typical hexdump like output

Add your public SSH key to a server in one command
Just run the command, type your password, and that's the last time you need to enter your password for that server. This assumes that the server supports publickey authentication. Also, the permissions on your home dir are 755, and the permissions on your .ssh dir are 700 (local and remote).

Securely destroy data on given device
Intentional hash in the beginning. May run a looong time. Wipes your data for real. Was meant to be /dev/urandom - I mistyped it. :-)

Create a list of binary numbers
If you should happen to find yourself needing some binary numbers, this is a quickie way of doing it. If you need more digits, just add more "{0..1}" sequences for each digit you need. You can assign them to an array, too, and access them by their decimal equivalent for a quickie binary to decimal conversion (for larger values it's probably better to use another method). Note: this works in bash, ksh and zsh. For zsh, though, you'll need to issue a setopt KSH_ARRAYS to make the array zero-based. $ binary=({0..1}{0..1}{0..1}{0..1}) $ echo ${binary[9]}


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: