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

Count the number of characters in each line

Grab all .flv files from a webpage to the current working directory
I wanted all the 'hidden' .flv files from the http link in the command line; wget seemed appropriate, fed with output from lynx, grep the flv files and the normalised via sed (to remove the numeric bullet). Similar to the 'Grab mp3 files' fu. Replace link with your own, grep arg with something more interesting ;) See here for something along the same lines... http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1006/grab-mp3-files-from-your-favorite-netcasts-mp3blog-or-sites-that-often-have-good-mp3s Hope you find it useful! Improvements welcome, naturally.

Network Proxy to dump the application level forward traffic in plain text in the console and in a file.
If you have a client that connects to a server via plain text protocol such as HTTP or FTP, with this command you can monitor the messages that the client sends to the server. Application level text stream will be dumped on the command line as well as saved in a file called proxy.txt. You have to change 8080 to the local port where you want your client to connect to. Change also 192.168.0.1 to the IP address of the destination server and 80 to the port of the destination server. Then simply point your client to localhost 8080 (or whatever you changed it to). The traffic will be redirected to host 192.168.0.1 on port 80 (or whatever you changed them to). Any requests from the client to the server will be dumped on the console as well as in the file "proxy.txt". Unfortunately the responses from the server will not be dumped.

A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

nmap port scanning
TCP Connect scanning for localhost and network 192.168.0.0/24

Find ulimit values of currently running process
When dealing with system resource limits like max number of processes and open files per user, it can be hard to tell exactly what's happening. The /etc/security/limits.conf file defines the ceiling for the values, but not what they currently are, while $ ulimit -a will show you the current values for your shell, and you can set them for new logins in /etc/profile and/or ~/.bashrc with a command like: $ ulimit -S -n 100000 >/dev/null 2>&1 But with the variability in when those files get read (login vs any shell startup, interactive vs non-interactive) it can be difficult to know for sure what values apply to processes that are currently running, like database or app servers. Just find the PID via "ps aux | grep programname", then look at that PID's "limits" file in /proc. Then you'll know for sure what actually applies to that process.

Displays the attempted user name, ip address, and time of SSH failed logins on Debian machines
A variation of a script I found on this site and then slimmed down to just use awk. It displays all users who have attempted to login to the box and failed using SSH. Pipe it to the sort command to see which usernames have the most failed logins.

Displays user-defined ps output and pidstat output about the top CPU or MEMory users.
It grabs the PID's top resource users with $(ps -eo pid,pmem,pcpu| sort -k 3 -r|grep -v PID|head -10) The sort -k is sorting by the third field which would be CPU. Change this to 2 and it will sort accordingly. The rest of the command is just using diff to display the output of 2 commands side-by-side (-y flag) I chose some good ones for ps. pidstat comes with the sysstat package(sar, mpstat, iostat, pidstat) so if you don't have it, you should. I might should take off the timestamp... :|

Recursively remove all subversion folders

Bulk renames with find, sed and a little escaping
This command is a more flexible than my previous submission. It will work with spaces however suuuuper hacky and ugly. Source: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/146173-find-rename-files-using-find-mv-sed.html


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: