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

Output as many input
Output of a command as input to many

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

send echo to socket network
Using netcat, usuallly installed on debian/ubuntu. Also to test against a sample server the following two commands may help echo got milk? | netcat -l -p 25 python -c "import SocketServer; SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler.handle = lambda self: self.request.send('got milk?\n'); SocketServer.TCPServer(('0.0.0.0', 25), SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler).serve_forever()"

Create cheap and easy index.html file
If your admin has disabled Apache's directory index feature but you want to have a cheap way to enable it for one folder, this command will just create an index.html file with a link to each file in the directory (including the index.html file, which is not ideal but makes the command much simpler). The HTML isn't even remotely compliant, but it could easily be improved on. Also, the command needs to be run each time a file is added or removed to update the index.html file.

Decode base64-encoded file in one line of Perl
If you are in an environment where you don't have the base64 executable or MIME tools available, this can be very handy for salvaging email attachments when the headers are mangled but the encoded document itself is intact.

yum -q list updates | tail -n+2

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Synchronize both your system clock and hardware clock and calculate/adjust time drift
Do not run this command if you already have ntpd running! This needs to run as root, for example with sudo: $ sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org && sudo hwclock --systohc && sudo hwclock --adjust This command will fetch accurate time from NTP servers and synchronize your system clock, then it will use the system clock to synchronize your hardware clock, and will calculate the time drift.

Go to the next sibling directory in alphabetical order
Sometimes you have to browse your way through a lot of sub-directories. This command cd to the next sub-directory in alphabetical order. For example, if you have the directories "lectures/01-intro", "lectures/02-basic", "lectures/03-advanced" and so on, and your PWD is "02-basic", it jumps to "03-advanced".

Add timestamp to history
History usually only gives the command number and the command. This will add a timestamp to the history file. Note: this will only put the correct timestamp on commands used after the export is done. You may want to put this in your .bashrc


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: