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

Split a large file, without wasting disk space
It's common to want to split up large files and the usual method is to use split(1). If you have a 10GiB file, you'll need 10GiB of free space. Then the OS has to read 10GiB and write 10GiB (usually on the same filesystem). This takes AGES. . The command uses a set of loop block devices to create fake chunks, but without making any changes to the file. This means the file splitting is nearly instantaneous. The example creates a 1GiB file, then splits it into 16 x 64MiB chunks (/dev/loop0 .. loop15). . Note: This isn't a drop-in replacement for using split. The results are block devices. tar and zip won't do what you expect when given block devices. . These commands will work: $ hexdump /dev/loop4 . $ gzip -9 < /dev/loop6 > part6.gz . $ cat /dev/loop10 > /media/usb/part10.bin

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"

"Clone" a list of installed packages from one Debian/Ubuntu Server to another

Make sure a script is run in a terminal.
Exit with error if script is not run in a terminal

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

Redirect STDIN
Several times, I find myself hitting my up arrow, and changing the search term. Unfortunately, I find myself wasting too much time typing: $ grep kernel /var/log/messages Redirecting STDIN allows me to put the search term at the end so I less cursor movement to change what I'm searching for: $ < /var/log/messages grep kernel If you're using the emacs keyboard binding, then after you press your up arrow, press CTRL+w to erase the word. If this has already been submitted, I couldn't find it with the search utility.

SVN Clean
Removes all unversioned files and folders from an svn repository. Also: $ svn status --no-ignore | grep ^I | awk '{print $2}' | xargs rm -rf will remove those files which svn status ignores. Handy to add to a script which is in your path so you can run it from any repository (a la 'svn_clean.sh').

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
While a dd is running in one terminal, open another and enter the while loop. The sample output will be displayed in the window running the dd and the while loop will exit when the dd is complete. It's possible that a "sudo" will need to be inserted before "pkill", depending on your setup, for example: $ while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO dd; sleep 10; done

True random passwords using your microphone noise as seed
Generate a truly random password using noise from your microphone to seed the RNG. This will spit out 12 password with 12 characters each, but you can save this into a bash script and replace 'pwgen -ys 12 12' with 'pwgen $@' so you can pass any paramters to pwgen as you would normally do.

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


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: