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

Show bash's function definitions you defined in .bash_profile or .bashrc
If you omit the function name, the command will display all definitions

Find top 10 largest files in /var directory (subdirectories and hidden files included )
Same as above, but modified to show human readable output

Prepend a text to a file.
Using the sed -i (inline), you can replace the beginning of the first line of a file without redirecting the output to a temporary location.

Quickly find a count of how many times invalid users have attempted to access your system

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Compress and store the image of a disk over the network
Create an image of "device" and send it to another machine through the network ("target" and "port" sets the ip and port the stream will be sent to), outputting a progress bar On the machine that will receive, compress and store the file, use: $nc -l -p | 7z a -si -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -ms=on Optionally, add the -v4g switch at the end of the line in order to split the file every 4 gigabytes (or set another size: accepted suffixes are k, m and g). The file will be compressed using 7z format, lzma2 algorithm, with maximum compression level and solid file activated. The compression stage will be executed on the machine which will store the image. It was planned this way because the processor on that machine was faster, and being on a gigabit network, transfering the uncompressed image wasn't much of a problem.

Run a command multiple times with different subcommands
it's nice to be able to use the command `ls program.{h,c,cpp}`. This expands to `ls program.h program.c program.cpp`. Note: This is a text expansion, not a shell wildcard type expansion that looks at matching file names to calculate the expansion. More details at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bash-brace-expansion I often run multiple commands (like apt-get) one after the other with different subcommands. Just for fun this wraps the whole thing into a single line that uses brace expansion.

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

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Listen Digitally Imported Radio from CLI (without premium!)
This commands does just two things: fakes user agent (the one was taken from recent Android app) and sends the (possibly) listener ID (it can be any - I put "1" here because it works like a charm - after the name of stream ?1 as you can see). Look for the list of stations here: http://pub7.di.fm Or here: https://goo.gl/pdhhpQ Best regards, sxiii :)


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: