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

Test your total disk IO capacity, regardless of caching, to find out how fast the TRUE speed of your disks are
Depending on the speed of you system, amount of RAM, and amount of free disk space, you can find out practically how fast your disks really are. When it completes, take the number of MB copied, and divide by the line showing the "real" number of seconds. In the sample output, the cached value shows a write speed of 178MB/s, which is unrealistic, while the calculated value using the output and the number of seconds shows it to be more like 35MB/s, which is feasible.

Generate a graph of package dependencies
Requires: imagemagick and graphviz On Debian systems, displays a graph of package dependencies. Works also with other image formats, like svg : $ apt-cache dotty bash | dot -T svg | display

check open ports without netstat or lsof

View details of network activity, malicious or otherwise within a port range.
View details of both TCP and UDP network activity within a specified port range.

Shrink more than one blank lines to one in VIM.

exit if another instance is running
runs only one instance.

show ls colors with demo
This can show all ls colors, with a demo.

Multi-line grep
Using perl you can search for patterns spanning several lines, a thing that grep can't do. Append the list of files to above command or pipe a file through it, just as with regular grep. If you add the 's' modifier to the regex, the dot '.' also matches line endings, useful if you don't known how many lines you need are between parts of your pattern. Change '*' to '*?' to make it greedy, that is match only as few characters as possible. See also http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1764/display-a-block-of-text-with-awk to do a similar thing with awk. Edit: The undef has to be put in a begin-block, or a match in the first line would not be found.

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

Multi line grep using sed and specifying open/close tags
This line does not include your closing tag in the output.


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: