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

Copy specific files recursively using the same tree organization.
This command has been used to overwrite corrupted "entries" files of a corrupted subversion working copy. Note the --files-from input format.

display systemd log entries for sshd using "no-pager" (a bit like in pre-systemd: grep sshd /var/log/messages)
In pre-systemd systems, something like: "# grep sshd /var/log/messages" would display log events in /var/log/messages containing "sshd". # journalctl -u sshd --no-pager The above command displays similar results for systemd systems. (Note that this needs to be run with root permissions to access the log data.)

Lists architecture of installed RPMs
Lists all installed RPM packages with name and architecture, which is useful to check for compability packages (+ required i386 packages) on a 64bit system.

give me back my sound card
for when a program is hogging the sound output. finds, and kills. add -9 to the end for wedged processes. add in 'grep ^program' after lsof to filter.

Open a file with specified application.
This command require mac os x.

To have only unique lines in a file

ROT13 using the tr command

MoscowML with editable input-line and history
Works also with SML/NJ and other interpreters or tools with interactive environments.

Shows cpu load in percent
Show the current load of the CPU as a percentage. Read the load from /proc/loadavg and convert it using sed: Strip everything after the first whitespace: $ sed -e 's/ .*//' Delete the decimal point: $ sed -e 's/\.//' Remove leading zeroes: $ sed -e 's/^0*//'

Generate a random password 30 characters long
According to the gpg(1) manual: --gen-random 0|1|2 count Emit count random bytes of the given quality level 0, 1 or 2. If count is not given or zero, an endless sequence of random bytes will be emitted. If used with --armor the output will be base64 encoded. PLEASE, don't use this command unless you know what you are doing; it may remove precious entropy from the system! If your entropy pool is critical for various operations on your system, then using this command is not recommended to generate a secure password. With that said, regenerating entropy is as simple as: $ du -s / This is a quick way to generate a strong, base64 encoded, secure password of arbitrary length, using your entropy pool (example above shows a 30-character long password).


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: