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

Get the full path of a bash script's Git repository head.
Rather than complicated and fragile paths relative to a script like "../../other", this command will retrieve the full path of the file's repository head. Safe with spaces in directory names. Works within a symlinked directory. Broken down: $cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" temporarily changes directories within this expansion. Double quoted "$(dirname" and ")" with unquoted ${BASH_SOURCE[0]} allows spaces in the path. $git rev-parse --show-toplevel gets the full path of the repository head of the current working directory, which was temporarily changed by the "cd".

Batch rename extension of all files in a folder, in the example from .txt to .md
Batch rename extension of all files in a folder, in the example from .txt to .md

deaggregate ip ranges
Taking file with ip ranges, each on it's own line like: $cat ipranges.txt 213.87.86.160-213.87.86.193 213.87.87.0-213.87.88.255 91.135.210.0-91.135.210.255 command returns deaggregated ip ranges using ipcalc deaggregate feature like that: 213.87.86.160/27 213.87.86.192/31 213.87.87.0/24 213.87.88.0/24 91.135.210.0/24 Useful for configuring nginx geo module

Display the history and optionally grep
Place this in your .bash_profile and you can use it two different ways. If you issue 'h' on its own, then it acts like the history command. If you issue: $ h cd Then it will display all the history with the word 'cd'

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Make changes in .bashrc immediately available
Any changes to BASH shell made in .bashrc will be active in the current terminal window from the moment you execute this command, ie. aliases, prompt settings etc. No need to restart terminal. (In BASH 'source' simile to 'eval' lets you generally execute any bunch of commands stacked in a text file).

Checks the syntax of all PHP files in and below the current working directory
Uses the PHP binary to check the syntax of all .php files in or below the current working directory. Really handy for doing that last minute check before you commit code to the repository.

Keep track of diff progress
You're running a program that reads LOTS of files and takes a long time. But it doesn't tell you about its progress. First, run a command in the background, e.g. $ find /usr/share/doc -type f -exec cat {} + > output_file.txt Then run the watch command. "watch -d" highlights the changes as they happen In bash: $! is the process id (pid) of the last command run in the background. You can change this to $(pidof my_command) to watch something in particular.

generate a randome 10 character password

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


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: