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

Download a file securely via a remote SSH server
This command will download $file via server. I've used this when FTP was broken at the office and I needed to download some software packages.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

grep compressed log files without extracting
accomplishes the same thing without unzipping the whole file, and while i have never seen a log.tar.gz file that was a binary, i will concede that it might happen, so add the -a in there: $zgrep -ia "string" log.tar.gz it's still shorter/easier to type...

Execute MySQL query send results from stdout to CSV
You can, of course, tell MySQL to output results to a file and dictate how to terminate lines, etc. But sometimes you don't have access to the file system MySQL is running on, complicating outputting your results to a CSV, necessitating either annoying hacks or this simple command :D

Number of open connections per ip.
Here is a command line to run on your server if you think your server is under attack. It prints our a list of open connections to your server and sorts them by amount. BSD Version: $ netstat -na |awk '{print $5}' |cut -d "." -f1,2,3,4 |sort |uniq -c |sort -nr

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

removing syncronization problems between audio and video
This assumes that there is a 10.2 sec delay between the video and the audio (delayed). To extract the original video into a audio and video composites look at the command on extracting audio and video from a movie

copy root to new device
Clone a root partition. The reason for double-mounting the root device is to avoid any filesystem overlay issues. This is particularly important for /dev. Also, note the importance of the trailing slashes on the paths when using rsync (search the man page for "slash" for more details). rsync and bash add several subtle nuances to path handling; using trailing slashes will effectively mean "clone this directory", even when run multiple times. For example: run once to get an initial copy, and then run again in single user mode just before rebooting into the new disk. Using file globs (which miss dot-files) or leaving off the trailing slash with rsync (which will create /mnt/target/root) are traps that are easy to fall into.

Display a list of all PHP classes that are called statically
Searches all .php files for a static instantiation of a class and displays the class names along with their frequencies.


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: