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

Sort movies by length, longest first
Sort .avi movies by time length, print the longest first, and so on...

The NMAP command you can use scan for the Conficker virus on your LAN
This was posted on reddit. replace 192.168.0.1-256 with the IP's you want to check.

List the largest directories & subdirectoties in the current directory sorted from largest to smallest.

List the size (in human readable form) of all sub folders from the current location

Display IP : Count of failed login attempts
The lastb command presents you with the history of failed login attempts (stored in /var/log/btmp). The reference file is read/write by root only by default. This can be quite an exhaustive list with lots of bots hammering away at your machine. Sometimes it is more important to see the scale of things, or in this case the volume of failed logins tied to each source IP. The awk statement determines if the 3rd element is an IP address, and if so increments the running count of failed login attempts associated with it. When done it prints the IP and count. The sort statement sorts numerically (-n) by column 3 (-k 3), so you can see the most aggressive sources of login attempts. Note that the ':' character is the 2nd column, and that the -n and -k can be combined to -nk. Please be aware that the btmp file will contain every instance of a failed login unless explicitly rolled over. It should be safe to delete/archive this file after you've processed it.

Run bash on top of a vi session (saved or not saved), run multiple commands, instead of one at a time with :!(bashcommand), type exit and [enter] to get back to where you left off in vi.
Helps when I'm editing a script and want to double check some commands without having to exit out of vi multiple times or having to use another terminal session.

Display a block of text with AWK

Fast portscanner via Parallel

beep when a server goes offline
pings a server once per second, and beeps when the server is unreachable. Basically the opposite of: $ ping -a server-or-ip.com which would beep when a server IS reachable. You could also substitute beep with any command, which makes this a powerful alternative to ping -a: $ while true; do [ "$(ping -c1W1w1 server-or-ip.com 2>/dev/null | awk '/received/ {print $4}')" = 1 ] && date || echo 'server is down!'; sleep 1; done which would output the date and time every sec until the ping failed, in which case it would echo. Notes: Requires beep package. May need to run as root (beep uses the system speaker) Tested on Ubuntu which doesn't have beep out of the box... $ sudo apt-get install beep

Download Entire YouTube Channel - all of a user's videos
create the function then run 'yt-chanrip username' to download that user's entire channel. uses youtube-dl and the GData API. similar to http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3154/download-youtube-playlist


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: