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

Bash scripts encryption and passphrase-protection
This function will encrypt a bash script and will only execute it after providing the passphrase. Requires mcrypt to be installed on the system.

Remove leading zeros in multiple columns with sed
Leading zeros might help correct sorting and they can be removed by sed after sorting

Merge various PDF files

port forwarding
pem file used by AWS servers for additional security

tail -f a log file over ssh into growl

Recursively compare two directories and output their differences on a readable format

Remove all hidden files in a directory
Remove all hidden files in a directory excluding current dir . and parent dir .. with .??* that means files with at least two characters.

Copy input sent to a command to stderr
In the above example 'muspi merol' (the output of the first rev command) is sent to stderr and 'lorem ipsum' (the output of the second rev command) is sent to stdout. rev reverse lines of a file or files. This use of tee allows testing if a program correctly handles its input without using files that hold the data.

Get an IP address out of fail2ban jail
Removes an iptables rule created by fail2ban. This example shows how to remove a rule for an IP from the fail2ban-SSH chain. Can be used for any service monitored by fail2ban. For more on fail2ban, see http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Find last reboot time
Displays time of last system boot


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: