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

Generate a shortened URL with is.gd
Check the API. You shouldn't need sed. The print-newline at the end is to prevent zsh from inserting a % after the end-of-output. Also works with http://v.gd

get all Amazon cloud (amazonws etc) ipv4 subnets

copy working directory and compress it on-the-fly while showing progress
What happens here is we tell tar to create "-c" an archive of all files in current dir "." (recursively) and output the data to stdout "-f -". Next we specify the size "-s" to pv of all files in current dir. The "du -sb . | awk ?{print $1}?" returns number of bytes in current dir, and it gets fed as "-s" parameter to pv. Next we gzip the whole content and output the result to out.tgz file. This way "pv" knows how much data is still left to be processed and shows us that it will take yet another 4 mins 49 secs to finish. Credit: Peteris Krumins http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

tail a log over ssh
This is also handy for taking a look at resource usage of a remote box. $ ssh -t remotebox top

Copy specific files recursively using the same tree organization.
This command has been used to overwrite corrupted "entries" files of a corrupted subversion working copy. Note the --files-from input format.

netcat as a portscanner

Backup a filesystem to a remote machine and use cstream to throttle bandwidth of the backup
This command will nicely dump a filesystem to STDOUT, compress it, encrypt it with the gpg key of your choice, throttle the the data stream to 60kb/s and finally use ssh to copy the contents to an image on a remote machine.

gzip over ssh
I've kept the gzip compression at a low level, but depending on the cpu power available on the source machine you may want to increase it. However, SQL compresses really well, and I found even with -1 I was able to transfer 40 MiB/s over a 100 mbps wire, which was good enough for me.

Random Number Between 1 And X
If X is 5, it will about a number between 1 and 5 inclusive. This works in bash and zsh. If you want between 0 and 4, remove the +1.

Get IP address from domain


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: