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

eth-tool summary of eth# devices
Give the Speed and Link status of eth# 0-3. This is sort of what mii-tool does, but eth-tool is better, yet lacks device discovery.

zsh only: access a file when you don't know the path, if it is in PATH
Say you want to execute 'file' on the command 'top' (to determine what type of file it is); but you don't know where 'top' resides: preface the argument with = and zsh will implicitly prepend the path.

Rename files in batch

Make Kali Linux look less suspicious by making the desktop look more like a windows machine
To revert back to Kali's original desktop. Just redo the same command with no options .

Connect-back shell using Bash built-ins
Connect-back shell using Bash built-ins. Useful in a web app penetration test, if it's the case of a locked down environment, without the need for file uploads or a writable directory. -- /dev/tcp and /dev/udb redirects must be enabled at compile time in Bash. Most Linux distros enable this feature by default but at least Debian is known to disable it. -- http://labs.neohapsis.com/2008/04/17/connect-back-shell-literally/

Gets the english pronunciation of a phrase
Sends a string to google tranlator, which converts it to English speech. It's possible to create a nice script to do the job for us, such as #!/bin'bash curl -A "Mozilla" "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=$1" > /tmp/speak.mp3 mplayer /tmp/speak.mp3

Opens files containing search term in vim with search term highlighted
Takes the same arguments that ack does. E.g. ack-open -i "searchterm" opens all files below the current directory containing the search term. The search term is also highlighted within vim if you have hlsearch set. Works on zsh, unsure if it works on bash. Note: ubuntu users have to change ack to ack-grep unless you already have it aliased (as I do)

Run a command as root, with a delay
$ sleep 1h ; sudo command or $ sudo sleep 1h ; sudo command won't work, because by the time the delay is up, sudo will want your password again.

Hiding and Show files on Mac OS X
These commands will mark a file as hidden or visible to Mac OS X Finder. Notice the capitol V vs the lowercase v. This will also work for directories. setfile -a V foo.bar; // This marks the file invisible setfile -a v foo.bar; // This marks the file visible I have also found that adding the following aliases are helpful: alias hide='setfile -a V' alias show='setfile -a v'

Give to anyone a command to immediatly find a particular part of a man.
Example : $ LC_ALL=C man less | less +/ppattern


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: