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

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"

Grabs a random image from "~/wallpapers" and sets as the background
don't bother spawning a bc process or counting the number of options, just pick a random one. 'sort -R' sorts randomly, so pick the top one.

Count the number of characters in a string from the standard input.

tar the current directory wihtout the absolute path
tars the current directory (and its children) in an archive of the same name (plus ".tar" :)) in the parent directory without the absolute path, so that when the archive is extracted, only the current directory name is created for the path. Assumes bash/zsh.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Get ssh server fingerprints
Get your server's fingerprints to give to users to verify when they ssh in. Publickey locations may vary by distro. Fingerprints should be provided out-of-band.

Randomize lines in a file
Works in sort (GNU coreutils) 7.4, don't know when it was implemented but sometime the last 6 years.

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

this toggles mute on the Master channel of an alsa soundcard

resize all JPG images in folder and create new images (w/o overwriting)
Convert all jpegs in the current directory into ~1024*768 pixels and ~ 150 KBytes jpegs


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: