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

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Test sendmail
test if sendmail is installed and working.

Generate a ZenCart-style MD5 password hash.
ZenCart uses a MD5 with a salt to secure its passwords. If you need to forcibly change someone's password to a known value within the database, this one-liner can generate the password. Change the value of 'p' to the password you want.

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions - (Open)solaris version with RBAC

hibernate

A command line calculator in Perl
Once I wrote a command line calculator program in C, then I found this... and added to it a bit. For ease of use I normally use this in a tiny Perl program (which I call pc for 'Perl Calculator') #!/usr/bin/perl -w die "Usage: $0 MATHS\n" unless(@ARGV);for(@ARGV){s/x/*/g;s/v/sqrt /g;s/\^/**/g}; print eval(join('',@ARGV)),$/; It handles square roots, power, modulus: $ pc 1+2 (1 plus 2) 3 $ pc 3x4 (3 times 4) 12 $ pc 5^6 (5 to the power of 6) 15625 $ pc v 49 ( square root of 49 ) 7 $ pc 12/3 (12 divided by 3) 4 $ pc 19%4 (19 modulus 4) 3 (you can string maths together too) $ pc 10 x 10 x 10 1000 $ pc 10 + 10 + 10 / 2 25 $ pc 7 x v49 49

Url Encode
It only encodes non-Basic-ASCII chars, as they are the only ones not well readed by UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (latin-1). It converts all * C3 X (some latin symbols like ASCII-extended ones) and * C2 X (some punctuation symbols like inverted exclamation) ...UTF-8 double byte symbols to escaped form that every parser understands to form the URLs. I didn't encode spaces and the rest of basic punctuation, but supposedly, space and others are coded as \x20, for example, in UTF-8, latin-1 and Windows-cp1252.... so its read perfectly. Please feel free to correct, the application to which I designe that function works as expected with my assumption. Note: I specify a w=999, I didn't find a flag to put unlimited value. I just suppose very improbable surpass the de-facto 255 (* 3 byte max) = 765 bytes length of URL

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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: