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

Find failures with journalctl
Sometimes things break. You can find the most recent errors using a combination of journalctl, along with the classic tools sort and uniq

Count all conections estabilished on gateway

Twitpic upload and Tweet

Write a bootable Linux .iso file directly to a USB-stick
Writes hybrid ISO directly to USB stick; replace /dev/sdb with USB device in question and the ISO image link with the link of your choice

Debug a remote php application (behind firewall) using ssh tunnel for XDEBUG port 9000
If you need to xdebug a remote php application, which is behind a firewall, and you have an ssh daemon running on that machine. you can redirect port 9000 on that machine over to your local machine from which you run your xdebug client (I am using phpStorm) So, run this command on your local machine and start your local xdebug client, to start debugging. more info: http://code.google.com/p/spectator/wiki/Installing

Stream YouTube URL directly to mplayer.
This is the result of a several week venture without X. I found myself totally happy without X (and by extension without flash) and was able to do just about anything but watch YouTube videos... so this a the solution I came up with for that. I am sure this can be done better but this does indeed work... and tends to work far better than YouTube's ghetto proprietary flash player ;-) Replace $i with any YouTube ID you want and this will scrape the site for the _real_ URL to the full quality .FLV file on Youtube's server and will then will hand that over to mplayer (or vlc or whatever you want) to be streamed. In some browsers you can replace $i with just a % or put this in a shell script so all YouTube IDs can be handed directly off to your media player of choice for true streaming without the need for Flash or a downloader like clive. (I do however fully recommend clive if you wish to archive videos instead of streaming them) If any interest is shown I would be more than happy to provide similar commands for other sites. Most streaming flash players use similar logic to YouTube. Edit: 05/03/2011 - Updated line to work with current YouTube. It could be a lot prettier but I will probably follow up with another update when I figure out how to get rid of that pesky Grep. Sed should take that syntax... but it doesn't. Original (no longer working) command: mplayer -fs $(echo "http://youtube.com/get_video.php?$(curl -s $youtube_url | sed -n "/watch_fullscreen/s;.*\(video_id.\+\)&title.*;\1;p")")

Rename files in batch

Search gpg keys from commandline

Generate random passwords (from which you may select "memorable" ones)
See: "man pwgen" for full details. Some Linux distros may not have pwgen included in the base distribution so you maye have to install it (eg in Mandriva Linux: "urpmi pwgen").

Generate the CPU utilization report
Generated the CPU utilization stats with 5 lines /every 2 seconds. Needs sysstat package to be installed prior to use sar.


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: