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

list files recursively by size

Optimize PDF documents

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

Show the command line for a PID, converting nulls to spaces and a newline
If you cat the file, all the parts of the command line are bunched up. If you use tr to convert the nulls to spaces, you're still left without a newline unless you add another step. This command does everything for you.

Quickly add a new user to all groups the default user is in
This is a standard procedure for me, whenever I set up a new Raspberry Pi system. Because the default user is "pi", I quickly replace it with my own (e.g. "kostis"), but I have to substitute that user to all of pi's groups first, before deleting the default account. xargs helps a lot with that in a single line, while avoiding boring "for" loops. For everything trickier, there's always "parallel" :)

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

password generator
make password randomly, default 8 chars, using bash3.X only, no external program.

Graph # of connections for each hosts.
Written for linux, the real example is how to produce ascii text graphs based on a numeric value (anything where uniq -c is useful is a good candidate).

How to pull out lines between two patterns
This command will display all lines between 2 patterns: word-a and word-b useful for grepping command outputs from file

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


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: