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

send substituted text to a command without echo, pipe
zsh only - This avoids the need for echo "message" | which creates an entire subshell. Also, the text you are most likely to edit is at the very end of the line, which, in my opinion, makes it slightly easier to edit.

Show most common words in filenames
I'm sure there's a more elegant sed version for the tr + grep section.

Check for login failures and summarize
This command checks for the number of times when someone has tried to login to your server and failed. If there are a lot, then that user is being targeted on your system and you might want to make sure that user either has remote logins disabled, or has a strong password, or both. If your output has an "invalid" line, it is a summary of all logins from users that don't exist on your system.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Switch to the previous branch used in git(1)
Very useful if you keep switching between the same two branches all the time.

Throttle download speed (at speed x )
Axel --max-speed=x, -s x You can specify a speed (bytes per second) here and Axel will try to keep the average speed around this speed. Useful if you don?t want the program to suck up all of your bandwidth.

create iso image from a directory
create iso image from directory . Usefull for virtualised machine To create CD ISO image of directories that contain long file name or non-8.3 format (particularly if you want to burn the CD image for use in Windows system), use the -J option switch that generates Joliet directory records in addition to regular iso9660 file names. For example, to create CD image of Vista SP1 directory: mkisofs -o VitaSP1.iso -J VistaSP1

Get MD5 checksum from a pipe stream and do not alter it

Use top to monitor only all processes with the same name fragment 'foo'
top accecpts a comma separated list of PIDs.

Unbelievable Shell Colors, Shading, Backgrounds, Effects for Non-X
I've been using linux for almost a decade and only recently discovered that most terminals like putty, xterm, xfree86, vt100, etc., support hundreds of shades of colors, backgrounds and text/terminal effects. This simply prints out a ton of them, the output is pretty amazing. If you use non-x terminals all the time like I do, it can really be helpful to know how to tweak colors and terminal capabilities. Like: $ echo $'\33[H\33[2J'


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: