Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 11,584 results
mplayer -framedrop -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all
2009-04-27 15:40:55
User: baergaj
Tags: video mplayer
11
Up
Down
play high-res video files on a slow processor

Certain codecs in high res don't play so well on my Dell Mini 9. Using this command, I can play just about anything and it keeps the sound in sync to boot!

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -i --color=auto
2009-04-27 15:03:28
User: P17
Functions: grep
12
Up
Down
Grep colorized

Highlights the search pattern in red.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo "Hello world" | base64
2009-04-27 15:00:08
User: P17
Functions: echo
Tags: encoding
-3
Up
Down
Encoding with base64

Also works with files:

cat file

Hello world

base64 file

SGVsbG8gd29ybGQK

To decrypt use the -d option:

echo SGVsbG8gd29ybGQK | base64 -d

Hello world

Show sample output | Comments (8) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cobbler check
2009-04-27 10:28:29
User: w00binda
Tags: cobbler provisioning
-3
Up
Down
Check cobbler environment

A script that checks if your environment is correctly configured for using cobbler.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cobbler repo add --name=CentOS-5.3-i386-updates --mirror=http://mirror3.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/CentOS/5.3/updates/i386/
2009-04-27 10:18:45
User: w00binda
Tags: cobbler
-1
Up
Down
Create new repo in Cobbler for CentOS 5.3 updates

Add a repo to cobbler. To download all the repository contents the command is:

cobbler reposync
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
lam -f 1.4 myfile
2009-04-26 19:31:22
User: servermanaged
0
Up
Down
Laminate files line by line

Lam is a command available on Bsd (I've tested it on OpenBSD).Is useful for laminate a file line by line. The -f option set the field width ( -f min.max ).

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
curl -f -O http://pcbsd.fastbull.org/7.0.2/i386/PCBSD7.0.2-x86-DVD.iso
2009-04-26 07:23:31
User: battavia
Tags: curl
-7
Up
Down
download a specific file

download a specific file with -f to not display errors and -O to write output to a file named as the remote file.

Show sample output | Comments (8) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in `screen -ls | perl -ne'if(/^\s+\d+\.([^\s]+)/){print $1, " "}'`; do gnome-terminal -e "screen -x $i"; done
2009-04-25 22:39:24
User: hank
Functions: perl
Tags: screen Linux perl
2
Up
Down
Connect to all running screen instances

There was another line that was dependent on having un-named screen sessions. This just wouldn't do. This one works no matter what the name is. A possible improvement would be removing the perl dependence, but that doesn't effect me.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for img in $( ls *.CR2 ); do convert $img $img.jpg; done
2009-04-25 19:11:52
User: bass000
Functions: ls
0
Up
Down
Convert Raw pictures to jpg
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in /sys/class/net/*; do e=`basename $i`; echo "# $e"; sudo ethtool $e | grep -E "Link|Speed" ; done
2009-04-25 14:32:08
User: hank
Functions: echo grep sudo
Tags: Network Linux
0
Up
Down
Get a summary of network devices in the system

Basically an improvement on an earlier ethtool command line.

Show sample output | Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
lsof -i
2009-04-25 14:24:04
User: hank
Tags: Network Ubuntu Linux
79
Up
Down
Watch Network Service Activity in Real-time
Comments (7) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
mkdir $(date +%Y%m%d)
2009-04-25 14:16:45
User: thebodzio
Functions: date mkdir
Tags: alias date mkdir
11
Up
Down
Create directory named after current date

Not a discovery but a useful one nontheless.

In the above example date format is 'yyyymmdd'. For other possible formats see 'man date'.

This command can be also very convenient when aliased to some meaningful name:

alias mkdd='mkdir $(date +%Y%m%d)'
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
lndir sourcedir destdir
2009-04-24 18:30:29
User: servermanaged
4
Up
Down
Propagate a directory to another and create symlink to content

Lndir create from source directory to destination directory a full symlink tree of all contents of source directory, really useful for propagate changes from a directory to another.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
look mysql /etc/group
2009-04-24 18:20:20
User: servermanaged
Functions: look
-2
Up
Down
Display lines with a given string

Look search for lines in a file that beginning with a given string.

Same as $ grep ^n /etc/passwd

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo "A great password" | md5sum
2009-04-24 14:32:56
User: ubersoldat
Functions: echo
Tags: md5sum password
-5
Up
Down
Use md5 to generate a pretty hard to crack password

You can also use sha1sum and variants for longer passwords

Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
/usr/local/bin/OFPW -mode 1
2009-04-24 13:09:17
User: tncook
-1
Up
Down
set open firmware password command mode to require password to make changes
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
/usr/local/bin/OFPW -pass thepassword
2009-04-24 13:08:31
User: tncook
-1
Up
Down
Sets OpenFirmware pasword on a mac
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
hwinfo --block --short
2009-04-24 11:13:31
User: Schneckentreiber
Tags: mount partition harddisk hardware storage
13
Up
Down
Show all detected mountable Drives/Partitions/BlockDevices

Yields entries in the form of "/dev/hda1" etc.

Use this if you are on a new system and don't know how the storage hardware (ide, sata, scsi, usb - with ever changing descriptors) is connected and which partitions are available.

Far better than using "fdisk -l" on guessed device descriptors.

Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in `ls *xml`; do sed -e 's,oldpassword,newpassword,g' $i > $i.2 && mv -f $i.2 $i ; done
2009-04-24 08:53:40
User: irraz
Functions: mv sed
-6
Up
Down
Change password in list of xml files with for and sed
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed 's/\o0/\n/g' /proc/INSERT_PID_HERE/environ
2009-04-23 22:58:57
User: unixmonkey3402
Functions: sed
15
Up
Down
Given process ID print its environment variables
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
mvn deploy:deploy-file -DgroupId=groupId -DartifactId=artifactId -Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=pathtolib -DrepositoryId=repository -Durl=url
2009-04-23 18:13:08
User: agasea
0
Up
Down
Install a library to a remote repository
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
meld <(antiword microsoft_word_a.doc) <(antiword microsoft_word_b.doc)
2009-04-23 15:14:32
User: peter_shook
2
Up
Down
compare two Microsoft Word documents

http://meld.sourceforge.net/

http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find ./ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
2009-04-22 21:14:36
User: ethanmiller
Functions: chmod find
Tags: chmod
31
Up
Down
Recursively change permissions on files, leave directories alone.
Comments (9) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
m-a a-i open-vm
2009-04-22 20:08:00
User: m03hr3
-4
Up
Down
compile openvm-tools

compile and install openvm-tools module in debian lenny

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
smbclient -U userbob //10.1.1.75/Shared
2009-04-22 19:58:51
User: ethanmiller
3
Up
Down
Browse shared folder when you're the only Linux user

Under Ubuntu smbclient is part of the samba package. With the version I use (3.0.28a) cd-ing into folders with spaces in the name is a drag. You have to put the folder name in quotes:

smb: \Shared\> cd "Marketing and PR"

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate