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 all images from a 4chan thread
first grep all href images then sed the url part then wget

bulk rename files with sed, one-liner
Far from my favorite, but works in sh and with an old sed that doesn't support '-E'

Brute force discover
Show the number of failed tries of login per account. If the user does not exist it is marked with *.

diff the outputs of two programs
I've been looking for this for a long time. Does anybody know how to do this in dash (POSIX shell)? An alternative version might be: $ exiftool img_1.jpg | diff -

quickly backup or copy a file with bash

get a rough estimate about how much disk space is used by all the currently installed debian packages
The vaule is expressed in megabytes

Run a command, store the output in a pastebin on the internet and place the URL on the xclipboard
The URL can then be pasted with a middle click. This is probably useful when trying to explain problems over instant messaging when you don't have some sort of shared desktop.

Backup a file with a date-time stamp
Appends the input file with the date format YYYY-MM-DD.bak. Also runs silently if you remove the -v on the cp at the end of the function.

Create a nifty overview of the hardware in your computer
After the command is done, open the html file in a browser

Generat a Random MAC address
Original author unknown (I believe off of a wifi hacking forum). Used in conjuction with ifconfig and cron.. can be handy (especially spoofing AP's)


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: