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

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 10,551 results
MAC=`(date; cat /proc/interrupts) | md5sum | sed -r 's/^(.{10}).*$/\1/; s/([0-9a-f]{2})/\1:/g; s/:$//;'`
2009-02-16 07:09:43
User: vaporub
Functions: cat md5sum sed
15
Up
Down
Generat a Random MAC address

Original author unknown (I believe off of a wifi hacking forum).

Used in conjuction with ifconfig and cron.. can be handy (especially spoofing AP's)

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
uuencode $file $file | /usr/bin/mailx -s "$file" ${USER}
2009-02-16 06:38:00
User: amiga500
Functions: uuencode
4
Up
Down
Email a file to yourself

This works on Solaris 10.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find ${PATH//:/ } -executable -type f -printf "%f\n"
2009-02-16 06:03:46
User: kamathln
Functions: find
5
Up
Down
List all execs in $PATH, usefull for grepping the resulting list

##Dependancies: bash coreutils

Many executables in $PATH have the keyword somewhere other than the beginning in their file names. The command is useful for exploring the executables in $PATH like this.

find ${PATH//:/ } -executable -type f -printf "%f\n" |grep admin

lpadmin

time-admin

network-admin

svnadmin

users-admin

django-admin

shares-admin

services-admin

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
pstree -Gap
2009-02-16 05:50:50
User: fulat2k
3
Up
Down
Displays process tree of all running processes

G - uses VT100 line drawing

a - shows command line arguments of process

p - prints PID of process

For other options, man pstree :)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . \( -type d -name .svn -prune \) -o -type d -print
2009-02-16 04:55:02
User: samc
Functions: find
4
Up
Down
Lists all directories under the current dir excluding the .svn directory and its contents
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get autoclean && sudo apt-get autoremove
2009-02-16 04:21:07
User: Skyrell
Functions: sudo
7
Up
Down
Does a full update and cleaning in one line
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
bzr init .;for file in `ls *.bz2`; do bzr import $file; bzr ci -m $file; done
2009-02-16 04:19:03
User: statik
Functions: file init
1
Up
Down
converts a directory full of source tarballs into a bzr repository so you can compare different versions easily
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
rgx_match() { python -c "import re; print re.search('$1','$2').groups()"; }
2009-02-16 04:07:54
User: jyro
Functions: python
1
Up
Down
Test python regular expressions

One can test their python regex matching using this shell function.

for e.g.

rgx_match "translate\s*\(([0-9-.]+),([0-9-.]+)\)" "translate(162.11517,76.817357)"

('162.11517', '76.817357')

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo dmidecode | more
2009-02-16 03:32:30
User: oreo
Functions: sudo
9
Up
Down
print indepth hardware info

wanna know something about your hardware? how about EVERYTHING?? then this should do ya well

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo alsa force-reload
2009-02-16 03:30:13
User: oreo
Functions: sudo
-5
Up
Down
reloads sound when it stop playing

if you lose your sound, this will restart alsa and you will get your sound back

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for (( i = 0; i < 100; i++ )); do echo "$i"; done
2009-02-16 03:19:26
User: themattrix
Functions: echo
2
Up
Down
Perform a C-style loop in Bash.

Print 0 through 99, each on a separate line.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -exec grep -l XXX {} \;|tee /tmp/fileschanged|xargs perl -pi.bak -e 's/XXX/YYY/g'
2009-02-16 02:55:23
User: drossman
Functions: find grep perl tee xargs
6
Up
Down
Change string in many files at once and more.

Find all files that contain string XXX in them, change the string from XXX to YYY, make a backup copy of the file and save a list of files changed in /tmp/fileschanged.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
umount -l /media/foo
2009-02-16 02:51:49
User: nomad
Functions: umount
-2
Up
Down
Unmount locked filesystems.

Will unmount a mount that has already dropped but is locked by a process.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
srchpymod() { python -c "import $1; print filter(lambda x: x.find('$2') >= 0, dir($1))"; };
2009-02-16 02:47:13
User: jyro
Functions: python
0
Up
Down
search into contents of python module

srchpymod

for e.g.

srchpymod cairo Surface

['ImageSurface', 'PDFSurface', 'PSSurface', 'SVGSurface', 'Surface', 'SurfacePattern', 'XlibSurface']

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cd -
2009-02-16 02:37:50
User: chmouel
Functions: cd
2
Up
Down
BourneShell: Go to previous directory

cd - would return to the previous directory of your cd command. NB: previous dir is always stored in $OLDPWD variable.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
killall nautilus
2009-02-16 02:33:12
User: binarysys
Functions: killall
-12
Up
Down
Restart nautilus
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo dpkg --purge `dpkg -l | awk '/^r/{print $2}'`
2009-02-16 02:18:02
User: elleryq
Functions: awk sudo
2
Up
Down
purge all packages marked with 'rc'

After you install/remove lots of packages, there are many packages marked with 'rc'. This script help you to purge these packages, it will save some spaces from your disk.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo 'example' | sed -e 's/^\(.\)/\U\1/'
2009-02-16 02:14:27
User: agentk
Functions: echo sed
-4
Up
Down
Convert the first character of a string to uppercase
Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
zcat /usr/share/doc/vim-common/README.gz | vim -g +23 -
2009-02-16 01:25:37
User: int19h
Functions: vim zcat
1
Up
Down
Pipe a textfile to vim and move the cursor to a certain line

This command is more for demonstrating piping to vim and jumping to a specific line than anything else.

Exit vim with :q!

+23 jumps to line 23

- make vim receive the data from the pipe

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -F | grep '\''\*'\'' | sed '\''s/\*$//'\
2009-02-16 01:16:49
User: int19h
Functions: grep ls sed
-4
Up
Down
List all executable files in the current directory
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
xmms `python -c "print \"tone://\" + \";\".join([str(22*(2**x)) for x in range(9)])"`
2009-02-16 01:12:34
User: int19h
0
Up
Down
Make a pipe organ sound using XMMS and Python

You can get XMMS from here if it's not in your repositories:

http://www.xmms.org/

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for h in host1 host2 host3 host4 ; { scp file user@$h:/destination_path/ ; }
2009-02-16 01:02:35
User: andrewtayloruk
Functions: file scp
7
Up
Down
Copy something to multiple SSH hosts with a Bash loop

Just a quick and simple one to demonstrate Bash For loop. Copies 'file' to multiple ssh hosts.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
strings /dev/urandom | grep -o '[[:alnum:]]' | head -n 30 | tr -d '\n'; echo
2009-02-16 00:39:28
User: jbcurtis
Functions: grep head strings tr
43
Up
Down
Generate a random password 30 characters long

Find random strings within /dev/urandom. Using grep filter to just Alphanumeric characters, and then print the first 30 and remove all the line feeds.

Show sample output | Comments (10) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for file in *.png; do convert "$file" "$(basename $file .png).gif"; done
2009-02-15 23:39:08
User: brettalton
Functions: file
3
Up
Down
Convert PNG to GIF

(relies on 'imagemagick')

Convert all .png files to .gif. This can also go the other way if you reverse the file extensions in the command, e.g.:

for file in *.gif; do convert "$file" "$(basename $file .gif).png"; done

If the file is named 'example1.png' it will be named 'example1.gif' when it is complete.

Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for file in `ls *.pdf`; do convert -verbose -colorspace RGB -resize 800 -interlace none -density 300 -quality 80 $file `echo $file | sed 's/\.pdf$/\.jpg/'`; done
2009-02-15 23:27:43
User: brettalton
Functions: file sed
26
Up
Down
Convert PDF to JPG

(relies on 'imagemagick')

This command will convert all .pdf files in a directory into a 800px (wide or height, whichever is smaller) image (with the aspect ratio kept) .jpg.

If the file is named 'example1.pdf' it will be named 'example1.jpg' when it is complete.

This is a VERY worthwhile command! People pay hundreds of dollars for this in the Windows world.

My .jpg files average between 150kB to 300kB, but your's may differ.

Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate