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

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Linux clear restrictions of a user's password
Command that clears the expiration restrictions of a user's password

Quickly move the cursor to different parts of the command line based on a mark.
Use 'ctrl-@' to set a mark. See the first comment for a better explanation.

View acceptable client certificate CA names asked for during SSL renegotiations
The key is to use the -prexit option at the command line, and then type "quit" instead of CTRL-C to exit OpenSSL. OpenSSL will then dump its last negotiated state, printing out the contents of the renegotiated handshake. Crucial for debugging client certificate configurations on web servers such as IIS, which renegotiate the SSL/TLS connection with the HTTP request in-flight to ask the client for a cert.

Generate password

Find all files with root SUID or SGID executables
Discovering all executables on your system that can be run as another user, especially root, is critical for system security. The above command will find those files with have SUID or SGID bits set and are owned by the root user or group.

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)

Find inside files two different patterns in the same line and for matched files show number of matched lines
The option -print0 for find and -0 for grep help prevent issue with weird characters or spaces in filenames. Furthermore with xargs there is no limited number of arguments that find can throw.

Listing directory content of a directory with a lot of entries
Ever wanted to get the directory content with 'ls' or 'find' and had to wait minutes until something was printed? Perl to the rescue. The one-liner above(redirected to a file) took less than five seconds to run in a directory with more man 2 million files. One can adapt it to e.g. delete files that match a certain pattern.

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


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: