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

apt-get upgrade with bandwidth limit
in Debian-based systems apt-get could be limited to the specified bandwidth in kilobytes using the apt configuration options(man 5 apt.conf, man apt-get). I'd quote man 5 apt.conf: "The used bandwidth can be limited with Acquire::http::Dl-Limit which accepts integer values in kilobyte. The default value is 0 which deactivates the limit and tries uses as much as possible of the bandwidth..." "HTTPS URIs. Cache-control, Timeout, AllowRedirect, Dl-Limit and proxy options are the same as for http..."

Grep auth log and print ip of attackers
Work for me on CentOS, grep and print ip addresses of ssh bruteforce attempts

Fix borked character coding in a tty.
Often you find some tty programs are messed up and confused about character encoding - 'man' is a common problem and sometimes displays weird characters for apostrophes, hyphens etc etc. Another class of programs that suffer from this are those that try to use the line drawing characters - eg RedHat's tty system admin functions such as system-config-firewall-tui system-config-network-tui etc. Adding 'LC_ALL=C' fixes most of these problems (as long as you want English! Perhaps speakers of other languages can add a comment here). For bonus points, I've added the '-c' option to the man command so that it ignores it's cache and re-computes the man page using the C locale.

Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

List installed deb packages by size

List only directories, one per line

Display IPs accessing your Apache webserver.

Uncompress a CSS file
Ever compress a file for the web by replacing all newline characters with nothing so it makes one nice big blob? It is a great idea, however what about when you want to edit that file? ...Serious pain in the butt. I ran into this today in that my only copy of a CSS file was "compressed" with no newlines. I whipped this up and it converted back into nice human readable CSS :-) It could be nicer, but it does the job.

Url Encode
Returns URL Encoded string from input ($1).

vi a remote file with port
If you are running sshd on different port use above this command to edit/view remote file with vi/vim. In above example I am using port 12345.


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: