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Remove color codes (special characters) with sed

Apache memory usage

print the name of each package APT knows [matching a prefix]
In this case, linux- is the prefix; simply running $apt-cache pkgnames would list every package APT knows about. The default APT config assumes -g, --generate; to use the cache as/is, you could similarly run: $apt-cache --no-generate pkgnames [prefix] Adding --all-names, like so: $apt-cache --no-generate --all-names pkgnames [prefix] would print all the packages APT knows about, using the cache as/is, including virtual packages and missing dependencies. This command was shamelessly stolen from the apt-cache(8) man-page.

Get contents from hosts, passwd, groups even if they're in DB/LDAP/other
getent allows to get the contents of several databases in their native file format even if they are not actually in /etc. For example, if you are using a LDAP or a DB to authenticate your users, you won't find their info by catting /etc/passwd, but "getent passwd" will concatenate /etc/passwd to the LDAP/DB.

Read and write to TCP or UDP sockets with common bash tools
Ever needed to test firewalls but didn't have netcat, telnet or even FTP? Enter /dev/tcp, your new best friend. /dev/tcp/(hostname)/(port) is a bash builtin that bash can use to open connections to TCP and UDP ports. This one-liner opens a connection on a port to a server and lets you read and write to it from the terminal. How it works: First, exec sets up a redirect for /dev/tcp/$server/$port to file descriptor 5. Then, as per some excellent feedback from @flatcap, we launch a redirect from file descriptor 5 to STDOUT and send that to the background (which is what causes the PID to be printed when the commands are run), and then redirect STDIN to file descriptor 5 with the second cat. Finally, when the second cat dies (the connection is closed), we clean up the file descriptor with 'exec 5>&-'. It can be used to test FTP, HTTP, NTP, or can connect to netcat listening on a port (makes for a simple chat client!) Replace /tcp/ with /udp/ to use UDP instead.

Display standard information about device
Queries the specified ethernet device for associated driver information

back ssh from firewalled hosts
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh. host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd). once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B. host B just do a ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user and reaches the remote host'ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.

vi a new file with execution mode
$ vix /tmp/script.sh Open a file directly with execution permission. Put the function in your .bashrc You can also put this in your vimrc: $ command XX w | set ar | silent exe "!chmod +x %" | redraw! and open a new file like this: $ vi +XX /tmp/script.sh

diff files while disregarding indentation and trailing white space
**NOTE** Tekhne's alternative is much more succinct and its output conforms to the files actual contents rather than with white space removed My command on the other hand uses bash process substitution (and "Minimal" Perl), instead of files, to first remove leading and trailing white space from lines, before diff'ing the streams. Very useful when differences in indentation, such as in programming source code files, may be irrelevant

Replace multiple file extensions with a single extension
The above is just a prove of concept based around the nested bash substitution. This could be useful in situations where you're in a directory with many filetypes but you only want to convert a few. $ for f in *.bmp *.jpg *.tga; do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done or you can use ls | egrep to get more specific... but be warned, files with spaces will cause a ruckus with expansion but the bash for loop uses a space delimited list. $ for f in $(ls | egrep "bmp$|jpg$|tga$"); do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done I'm guessing some people will still prefer doing it the sed way but I thought the concept of this one was pretty neat. It will help me remember bash substitutions a little better :-P


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