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

[re]verify a disc with very friendly output
[re]verify those burned CD's early and often - better safe than sorry - at a bare minimum you need the good old `dd` and `md5sum` commands, but why not throw in a super "user-friendly" progress gauge with the `pv` command - adjust the ``-s'' "size" argument to your needs - 700 MB in this case, and capture that checksum in a "test.md5" file with `tee` - just in-case for near-future reference. *uber-bonus* ability - positively identify those unlabeled mystery discs - for extra credit, what disc was used for this sample output?

FInd the 10 biggest files taking up disk space

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"

Define shell variable HISTIGNORE so that comments (lines starting with #) appear in shell history
I was surprised to find that with RedHat bash, I could not find any comment lines (begining with #) in my bash shell history. Surprised because in Mageia Linux this works. It turns out that RedHat's bash will keep comment lines if in my .bashrc, I define: export HISTIGNORE=' cd "`*: PROMPT_COMMAND=?*?' Why have comment lines in shell history? It's a handy and convenient way to make proto-commands (to be completed later) and for storing brief text data that is searchable in shell history.

Change SSH RSA passphrase
Protects your secret identity with a passphrase. OSX 10.6 automatically does key forwarding and can store the passphrase in the keychain. For other OSes, use ssh -A or set ForwardAgent in ssh_config to enable forwarding. Then use ssh-agent/ssh-add.

copy from host1 to host2, through your host
This is a 'nocd' alternative :)

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Find class in jar

port scan using parallel
It takes over 5 seconds to scan a single port on a single host using nmap $ time (nmap -p 80 192.168.1.1 &> /dev/null) real 0m5.109s user 0m0.102s sys 0m0.004s It took netcat about 2.5 minutes to scan port 80 on the class C $ time (for NUM in {1..255} ; do nc -w 1 -z -v 192.168.1.${NUM} 80 ; done &> /dev/null) real 2m28.651s user 0m0.136s sys 0m0.341s Using parallel, I am able to scan port 80 on the entire class C in under 2 seconds $ time (seq 1 255 | parallel -j255 'nc -w 1 -z -v 192.168.1.{} 80' &> /dev/null) real 0m1.957s user 0m0.457s sys 0m0.994s

show the working directories of running processes
this shows the CWD of every running `java' command. YMMV but we often switch to a working directory for each service to start and run from there -- therefore this quicly shows what is running by a more meaningful name than command alone (the -bw prevents using blocking system calls which speeds this up quite a bit in the presence of remote mounted filesystems)


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: