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

return external ip
curl inet-ip.info -> 113.33.232.62\n curl inet-ip.info/ip -> 113.33.232.62 curl inet-ip.info/json -> JSON print curl inet-ip.info/json/indent -> JSON pretty print curl inet-ip.info/yaml -> YAML format curl inet-ip.info/toml -> TOML format http://inet-ip.info

Convert ascii string to hex
Converts the ascii text to hex from bash. Check the sample output.

back ssh from firewalled hosts
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh. host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd). once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B. host B just do a ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user and reaches the remote host'ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.

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

Simple way to envoke a secure vnc session through ssh enabled router.
The ip address is of the remote machine running the vncserver. Must log in first to the router then the VNC session. Very nice if you have open-wrt or dd-wrt on your router.

Convert text to picture
generates a picture file with the text. Some other samples in: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/text/

small CPU benchmark with PI, bc and time.
$ # 4 cores with 2500 pi digits $ CPUBENCH 4 2500 $. $ every core will use 100% cpu and you can see how fast they calculate it. $ if you do 50000 digitits and more it can take hours or days

Get line number 12 (or n) from a file
Extracts only file number 12 from file. It's meant for text files. Replace 12 with the number you want. First line starts at 1 not 0. We use q on next line so doesn't process any line more.

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX
Works on asterisk 1.8.

sends your internal IP by email
This is useful if you have need to do port forwarding and your router doesn't assign static IPs, you can add it to a script in a cron job that checks if you IP as recently changed or with a trigger script. This was tested on Mac OSX.


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: