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

Collect a lot of icons from /usr/share/icons (may overwrite some, and complain a bit)
In other way of xargs, only with find -exec

Colorizes an access log
Puts a splash of color in your access logs. IP addresses are gray, 200 and 304 are green, all 4xx errors are red. Works well with e.g. "colorize access_log | less -R" if you want to see your colors while paging. Use as inspiration for other things you might be tailing, like syslog or vmstat Usage: $ tail -f access.log | colorize

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

Throttle download speed (at speed x )
Axel --max-speed=x, -s x You can specify a speed (bytes per second) here and Axel will try to keep the average speed around this speed. Useful if you don?t want the program to suck up all of your bandwidth.

Compare two CSV files, discarding any repeated lines
The value for the sort command's -k argument is the column in the CSV file to sort on. In this example, it sorts on the second column. You must use some form of the sort command in order for uniq to work properly.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Copy stdin to your X11 buffer
Have you ever had to scp a file to your work machine in order to copy its contents to a mail? xclip can help you with that. It copies its stdin to the X11 buffer, so all you have to do is middle-click to paste the content of that looong file :)

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Backup of a partition
Clone a partion with tar.

get rid of lines with non ascii characters
found here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9035939


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: