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

check open ports without netstat or lsof

convert plain .avi movies to .mpeg
works "out of the box" on ubuntu 8.10

recurisvely md5 all files in a tree
Found this little gem here: http://info.michael-simons.eu/2008/10/25/recursively-md5sum-all-files-in-a-directory-tree/

See multiple progress bars at once for multiple pipes with pv
In this example we convert a .tar.bz2 file to a .tar.gz file. If you don't have Pipe Viewer, you'll have to download it via apt-get install pv, etc.

convert from hexidecimal or octal to decimal
Bash can accept '0x' and '0' notation for hexidecimal and octal numbers, so you just have to output the values.

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

find all active IP addresses in a network
Have to run as superuser... but easier and more informational if you are looking for actual devices. Need to install arp-scan.

DELETE all those duplicate files but one based on md5 hash comparision in the current directory tree
This one-liner will the *delete* without any further confirmation all 100% duplicates but one based on their md5 hash in the current directory tree (i.e including files in its subdirectories). Good for cleaning up collections of mp3 files or pictures of your dog|cat|kids|wife being present in gazillion incarnations on hd. md5sum can be substituted with sha1sum without problems. The actual filename is not taken into account-just the hash is used. Whatever sort thinks is the first filename is kept. It is assumed that the filename does not contain 0x00. As per the good suggestion in the first comment, this one does a hard link instead: $ find . -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | perl -ne 'chomp; $ph=$h; ($h,$f)=split(/\s+/,$_,2); if ($h ne $ph) { $k = $f; } else { unlink($f); link($k, $f); }'

Tail a log and replace according to a sed pattern
Tails a log and replaces it line-by-line according to whatever you want to replace. Useful if the file writing to the log can't be modified, so you need to modify its output instead.

Find the package that installed a command


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: