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

Recursively Add Changed Files to Subversion
Extracted from http://www.howtogeek.com/wiki/Recursively_Add_Changed_Files_to_Subversion

Get a list of IP Addresses that have failed to login via SSH
This command shows a sorted list of the IP addresses from which there have been authentication errors via SSH (possible script kiddies trying to gain access to your server), it eliminates duplicates so it's easier to read, but you can remove the "uniq" command at the end, or even do a "uniq -c" to have a count of how many times each IP address shows in the log (the path to the log may vary from system to system)

tail: watch a filelog
-f file(s) to be monitorized -n number of last line to be printed on the screen in this example, the content of two files are displayed

Simplified video file renaming
I used this when I had a directory of movies from a camera. I wanted to watch a little of each movie, then rename it depending on what was in the movie. This did the trick for me.

Rename .JPG to .jpg recursively
Recursively rename .JPG to .jpg using standard find and mv. It's generally better to use a standard tool if doing so is not much more difficult.

Use QEMU to create a hardware dual-boot without rebooting
After downloading an ISO image, assuming you have QEMU installed, it’s possible to boot an ISO image in a virtual machine and then install that ISO from within the virtual machine directly to a physical drive, bypassing the need to reboot. Simply pass the ISO image as the -cdrom parameter, followed by “format=raw,file=/dev/sdb” (replace /dev/sdb with the drive you want to install to) as the hard drive parameter (making absolutely certain to specify the raw format, of course). Once you boot into the ISO image with QEMU, just run the installer as if it were a virtual machine — it’ll just use the physical device as an install target. After that, you’ll be able to seamlessly boot multiple distros (or even other operating systems) at once.

prints the parameter you used on the previous command

Getting a domain from url, ex: very nice to get url from squid access.log

Create thumbnails and a HTML page for listing them (with links to sources)
The input images are assume to have the "JPG" extension. Mogrify will overwrite any gif images with the same name! Will not work with names with spaces.

Continuously listen on a port and respond with a fixed message with netcat (and respond to kill signals)
`while true`: do forever `nc -l -p 4300 -c 'echo hello'`: this is the but anything can go here really `test $? -gt 0 && break`: this checks the return code for ctrl^c or the like and quite the loop, otherwise in order to kill the loop you'd have to get the parent process id and kill it.


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: