commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.
Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.
If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/
You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.
First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.
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
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:
This gives you lots of nifty Cisco network information like VLAN tag, port and switch information.
If you typed 'sl', put the cursor on the 'l' and hit ctrl-t to get 'ls'.
This command uses the debugger to attach to a running process, and reassign a filehandle to a file.
The two commands executed in gdb are
p close(1) which closes STDOUT
and
p creat("/tmp/filename",0600)
which creates a file and opens it for output. Since file handles are assigned
sequentially, this command opens the file in place of STDOUT and once the process continues, new output to STDOUT will instead be written to our capture file.
In my work environment, we log onto the servers as our user ('user', in the sample ouput), and 'sudo su - root' to other accounts. This trick allows us to return the account name we logged in as -- and not the account name we currently are ('root', in this example).
Using this trick, you can build other commands:
Set your CVSROOT env variable to your account name:
CVSROOT=$(who am i | awk '{print $1}')@cvs.server.example.com:/cvsroot
SCP a file to another server:
scp file.txt $(who am i | awk '{print $1}')@some.other.server.com:.
This works out great in my environment, as we can include this in our documentation and make the comands more easy to copy/paste for different users, and not have to set all sorts of variables, or modify the docs for each user.
whoami gives you the name of the user you currently are, not the user you logged on originally as.
who gives you a listing of every single person logged onto the server.
who am i gives you the name of the user you logged on as, and not who you changed to with su.
Look at the following scenario:
whoami
user
su -
# whoami
root
# who am i
user pts/51 2009-02-13 10:24 (:0.0)
whoami != who am i
replace username, password, and nameofnewfriend with proper values. Remember to escape things like ! or & in your password
The Festival Speech Synthesis System converts text into sound.
Or: links -dump http://youfavoritewebsite.com | festival --tts
This is not actually a command, it's just a keyboard shortchut. But a very useful one.
'pushd +1' is equivalent to 'pushd'. Can be 'pushd +3' or more generaly 'pushd +N'. Can also be 'pushd -N'.
More description in 'man bash'.
This one-liner outputs a random number between the values given for FLOOR and RANGE.
If the machine is hanging and the only help would be the power button, this key-combination will help to reboot your machine (more or less) gracefully.
R - gives back control of the keyboard
S - issues a sync
E - sends all processes but init the term singal
I - sends all processes but init the kill signal
U - mounts all filesystem ro to prevent a fsck at reboot
B - reboots the system
Save your file before trying this out, this will reboot your machine without warning!
Probably only works with GNU du and modern perls.
/lib/ld-linux.so.2
is the runtime linker/loader for ELF binaries on Linux.
=(cmd) is a zsh trick to take the output for the command "inside" it and save it to a temporary file.
echo -e 'blah' | gcc -x c -o /dev/stdout -
pipes the C source to gcc. -x c tells gcc that it's compiling C (which is required if it's reading from a pipe). -o /dev/stdout - tells it to write the binary to standard output and read the source from standard input.
because of the the =() thing, the compiled output is stashed in a tempfile, which the loader then runs and executes, and the shell tosses the tempfile away immediately after running it.
Forwards localhost:1234 to machine:port, running all data through your chain of piped commands. The above command logs inbound and outbound traffic to two files.
Tip: replace tee with sed to manipulate the data in real time (use "sed -e 's/400 Bad Request/200 OK/'" to tweak a web server's responses ;-) Limitless possibilities.
This will cause your machine to INSTANTLY reboot. No un-mounting of drives or anything.
Very handy when something has gone horribly wrong with your server in that co-location facility miles away with no remote hands!
Suspect this works with all 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernels compiled with magic-syskey-request support.
This is handy to just shove into a daily cron entry. If you do use cron, make sure to escape the %d with \%d or it will fail.
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1828 0.0 0.0 5396 476 ? Ss 2008 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
If you have some textfile with an unknown encoding you can use this list to find out
If the 'lm' flag is present, then the CPU is 64-bit.
If no output, then CPU is 32-bit.