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

Create an audio test CD of sine waves from 1 to 99 Hz
This command creates and burns a gapless audio CD with 99 tracks. Each track is a 30 second sine wave, the first is 1 Hz, the second 2 Hz, and so on, up to 99 Hz. This is useful for testing audio systems (how low can your bass go?) and for creating the constant vibrations needed to make non-Newtonian fluids (like cornstarch and water) crawl around. Note, this temporarily creates 500MB of .cdda files in the current directory. If you don't use the "rm" at the end of the command, you can burn more disks using $ cdrdao write cdrdao.toc Prerequisites: a blank CD-R in /dev/cdrw, sox (http://sox.sourceforge.net/), and cdrdao (http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/). I'm also assuming a recent version of bash for the brace expansion (which just looks nicer than using seq(1), but isn't necessary).

Create a square thumbnail or favicon using ImageMagick
Resize `file.png` to a 32x32 px image. Use a value other than 32 to create other icon sizes (e.g. 16x16 or 32x32). Combine two favicon sizes using: `convert icon-16px.png icon-32px.png favicon.ico` For a social media preview image, use `2:1#` for the extent and `1200` for the scale.

Replace php short open tags
Tired of front end developers using short open tags in your views? This will replace all instances of

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

find an unused unprivileged TCP port
Not really better - just different ;) There's probably a really simple solution out there somewhere...

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

Add temporary <1m entries to old cron
Old cron doesn't allow periods

Show last changed files in a directory
This will quickly display files last changed in a directory, with the newest on top.

get stdout to variable and stdout at sametime
Sometimes you want to write the script output to stdout but you need to send it to email. If you use: $ var="$( ls / )"; $ echo -e "$var"; works but, you need to wait the script terminate to bufferize then print the output var; With this way, you can use/work/print the output before the variable receive all the output content, then after it you can use the variable for anything else, like send email.

Find running binary executables that were not installed using dpkg
This helped me find a botnet that had made into my system. Of course, this is not a foolproof or guarantied way to find all of them or even most of them. But it helped me find it.


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: