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

Search big files with long lines
This is a handy way to circumvent the "Maximum line length of 2048 exceeded" grep error. Once you have run the above command (or put it in your .bashrc), files can be searched using: $ lgrep search-string /file/to/search

Check SSH public and private keys matching
Tested in bash4

Check variable has been set

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Create a listing of all possible permissions and their octal representation.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Quick way to sum every numbers in a file written line by line
If you have a file full of numbers written line by line, you can sum every line to get the total. With a file like this: 3443535 9878977 67554 987798 232324 you will got: 14610188

Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one
As an alternative to using an additional grep -v grep you can use a simple regular expression in the search pattern (first letter is something out of the single letter list ;-)) to drop the grep command itself.

Recursively execute command on directories (.svn, permissions, etc)
The above command will set the GID bit on all directories named .svn in the current directory recursively. This makes the group ownership of all .svn folders be the group ownership for all files created in that folder, no matter the user. This is useful for me as the subversion working directory on my server is also the live website and needs to be auto committed to subversion every so often via cron as well as worked on by multiple users. Setting the GID bit on the .svn folders makes sure we don't have a mix of .svn metadata created by a slew of different users.

Find the package that installed a command


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: