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

Display the tree of all instance of a particular process

search the manual page names and descriptions

Remove duplicate entries in a file without sorting.
Using awk, find duplicates in a file without sorting, which reorders the contents. awk will not reorder them, and still find and remove duplicates which you can then redirect into another file.

Create Encrypted WordPress MySQL Backup without any DB details, just the wp-config.php
The coolest way I've found to backup a wordpress mysql database using encryption, and using local variables created directly from the wp-config.php file so that you don't have to type them- which would allow someone sniffing your terminal or viewing your shell history to see your info. I use a variation of this for my servers that have hundreds of wordpress installs and databases by using a find command for the wp-config.php file and passing that through xargs to my function.

Download all mp3's listed in an html page

cpu stress test
For each cpu set mask and then monitor your cpu infos. Temp,load avg. etc. For example for 2nd cpu or 2nd core taskset 0x00000002 yes > /dev/null & For example for 3rd cpu or 3rd core taskset 0x00000004 yes > /dev/null & For example for 4th cpu or 4th core taskset 0x00000008 yes > /dev/null & Monitor your cpu temp with this command if you want watch -n1 "acpi -t" Load avg. from top command top kerim@bayner.com http://www.bayner.com/

Waste time for about 3 minutes
If you're a slow reader and/or you like to ponder, adjust the sleep time to be longer

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

put an unpacked .deb package back together
If any changes have been made to the package while it was unpacked (ie, conffiles files in /etc modi‐fied), the new package will inherit the changes. This way you can make it easy to copy packages from one computer to another, or to recreate packages that are installed on your system, but no longer available elsewhere. Note: dpkg-repack will place the created package in the current directory.

resume other user's screen session via su, without pty error
Normally, if you su to another user from root and try to resume that other user's screen session, you will get an error like "Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/0' - please check." This is because the other user doesn't have permission for root's pty. You can get around this by running a "script" session as the new user, before trying to resume the screen session. Note you will have to execute each of the three commands separately, not all on the same line as shown here. Credit: I found this at http://www.hjackson.org/blog/archives/2008/11/29/cannot-open-your-terminal-dev-pts-please-check.


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: