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

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

convert a web page into a pdf
This uses the "command-line print" plugin for Firefox (http://torisugari.googlepages.com/commandlineprint2). This same plugin can also produce PNGs. On *nix, the file must exist; therefore the touch bit in front. Also, firefox seems to ignore saved user preferences when "printing" this way (margins, header, footer, etc.), so I had to tweak my ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/prefs.js file by hand. Yup, that's *prefs.js* not user.js - apparently, firefox ignores my user.js file too...

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Show me a histogram of the busiest minutes in a log file:
Busiest seconds: $ cat /var/log/secure.log | awk '{print substr($0,0,15)}' | uniq -c | sort -nr | awk '{printf("\n%s ",$0) ; for (i = 0; i

Opens vi/vim at pattern in file
Open up vi or vim at the first instance of a pattern in [file]. Useful if you know where you want to be, like "PermitRootLogin" in sshd_config. Also, vi +10 [file] will open up a file at line 10. VERY useful when you get "error at line 10" type of output.

return external ip

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

Ping a range of addresses

Convert ascii string to hex

Rename files in batch


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: