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

Find all the links to a file
This command finds and prints all the symbolic and hard links to a file. Note that the file argument itself be a link and it will find the original file as well. You can also do this with the inode number for a file or directory by first using stat or ls or some other tool to get the number like so: $ stat -Lc %i file or $ ls -Hid file And then using: $ find -L / -inum INODE_NUMBER -exec ls -ld {} +

Umount only the NFS related to 'string'
Sometimes, you have a lot of NFS in the server and you can't or shouldn't use umount -a. Whis this command, you only umount the fs related to the 'string'

A function to find the newest file in a directory

Get the Nth argument of the last command (handling spaces correctly)
Bash's history expansion character, "!", has many features, including "!:" for choosing a specific argument (or range of arguments) from the history. The gist is any number after !: is the number of the argument you want, with !:1 being the first argument and !:0 being the command. See the sample output for a few examples. For full details search for "^HISTORY EXPANSION" in the bash(1) man page.    Note that this version improves on the previous function in that it handles arguments that include whitespace correctly.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Watch Network Service Activity in Real-time

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

Do a search-and-replace in a file after making a backup

Faster find and move using the find and xargs commands. Almost as fast as locate.
Only tested on Linux Ubunty Hardy. Works when file names have spaces. The "-maxdepth 2" limits the find search to the current directory and the next one deeper in this example. This was faster on my system because find was searching every directory before the current directory without the -maxdepth option. Almost as fast as locate when used as above. Must use double quotes around pattern to handle spaces in file names. -print0 is used in combination with xargs -0. Those are zeros not "O"s. For xargs, -I is used to replace the following "{}" with the incoming file-list items from find. Echo just prints to the command line what is happening with mv. mv needs "{}" again so it knows what you are moving from. Then end with the move destination. Some other versions may only require one "{}" in the move command and not after the -I, however this is what worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04. Some like to use -type f in the find command to limit the type.

Summarize Apache Extended server-status to show longest running requests
Ever need to know why Apache is bogging down *right now*? Hate scanning Apache's Extended server-status for the longest running requests? Me, too. That's why I use this one liner to quickly find suspect web scripts that might need review. Assuming the Extended server-status is reachable at the target URL desired, this one-liner parses the output through elinks (rendering the HTML) and shows a list of active requests sorted by longest running request at the bottom of the list. I include the following fields (as noted in the header line): Seconds: How long the request is alive PID: Process ID of the request handler State: State of the request, limited to what I think are the relevant ones (GCRK_.) IP: Remote Host IP making the request Domain: Virtual Host target (HTTP/1.1 Host: header). Important for Virtual Hosting servers TYPE: HTTP verb URL: requested URL being served. Putting this in a script that runs when triggered by high load average can be quite revealing. Can also capture "forgotten" scripts being exploited such as "formmail.pl", etc.


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: