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

Rebuild a Delimited File with a Unique Delimiter
Useful for CSV files. In the command, the file in question is comma delimited but contains double quoted fields containing commas and contains no @ symbols (as confirmed with http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/9998/delimiter-hunting). This command converts the delimiting commas to @s while preserving the commas in the fields using the "uniqueString" to mark the ends of lines.

Get shellcode of the binary using objdump
Anyone can make the command smaller & easier? :)

check open ports without netstat or lsof

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

Shell function to create a menu of items which may be inserted into the X paste buffer.
The function will take a comma separated list of items to be 'selected' by xsel -i: $ smenu "First item to paste,Paste me #2,Third menu item" You will then be prompted to choose one of the menu items. After you choose, you will be able to paste the string by clicking the middle mouse button. The menu will keep prompting you to choose menu items until you break out with Control-C.

VIM: when Ctrl-D and Ctrl-U only scroll one line, reset to default
Resets the scroll parameter to the default (half the rows in the current window). The scroll parameter can be inadvertently set to 1, e..g., if you type '1 Ctrl-D' or '1 Ctrl-U' in normal mode.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

set desktop background to highest-rated image from Reddit /r/wallpapers
You'll need "feh" to set the background from the commandline. Install with "apt-get install feh" Thanks to the Redditors on this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bira4/is_there_a_linux_version_of_this_preferably_a/

Capture video of a linux desktop
This will grab the image from desktop, starting with the upper-left corner at x=100, y=200 with a width and height of 1024?768.

Find running binary executables that were not installed using dpkg
This helped me find a botnet that had made into my system. Of course, this is not a foolproof or guarantied way to find all of them or even most of them. But it helped me find it.


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: