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

Record MP3 audio via ALSA using ffmpeg
Record audio to an MP3 file via ALSA. Adjust -i argument according to arecord -l output.

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).

print line and execute it in BASH
If script.sh contains only these two lines: $ uname -a $ whoami

Spoof your wireless MAC address on OS X to 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6
If you want to check that the spoof worked, type the same command as earlier: $ifconfig en1 | grep ether Now you will see: $ether 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6 For the wired ethernet port: $sudo ifconfig en0 ether 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6

Bare Metal IRC Client
Uses the extremely cool utilities netcat and expect. "expect" logs in & monitors for server PING checks. When a PING is received it sends the PONG needed to stay connected. IRC commands to try: HELP, TIME, MOTD, JOIN and PRIVMSG The "/" in front of IRC commands are not needed, e.g. type JOIN #mygroup Learn about expect: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue48/fisher.html The sample output shows snippets from an actual IRC session. Please click UP button if you like it!

shows history of logins on the server
outputs a history of logins on the server (top 10, when piped to 'head'); optional flags: '-a' put the hostname at the end of the line (good for long hostnames), '-i' post the IP instead of the hostname, '-F' put the full login and logout times, rather than short times.

Numeric zero padding file rename
rename file name with fixed length nomeric format pattern

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Comma insertions
Insert a comma where necessary when counting large numbers. I needed to separate huge amounts of packets and after 12+ hours of looking in a terminal, I wanted it in readable form.

Top 10 requestors by IP address from Apache/NCSA Logs


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: