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

List the binaries installed by a Debian package
GNU grep's perl-compatible regular expression(PCRE).

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"

Test your total disk IO capacity, regardless of caching, to find out how fast the TRUE speed of your disks are
Depending on the speed of you system, amount of RAM, and amount of free disk space, you can find out practically how fast your disks really are. When it completes, take the number of MB copied, and divide by the line showing the "real" number of seconds. In the sample output, the cached value shows a write speed of 178MB/s, which is unrealistic, while the calculated value using the output and the number of seconds shows it to be more like 35MB/s, which is feasible.

locate bin, src, and man file for a command

Vi - Matching Braces, Brackets, or Parentheses
This is a simple command for jumping to the matching brace, square bracket, or parentheses. For example, it can take you from the beginning of a function to the end with one key stroke. To delete everything between the pairs of {}, [], or (), issue the command: $ d% To replace text between pairs of braces, brackets, or parentheses, issue the command: $ c% You can also use this command to find out if an opening brace has been properly closed.

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

A formatting test for David Winterbottom: improving commandlinefu for submitters
Commandlinefu.com is great but has a few bugs when people are submitting new commands: . 1. There is no preview button. This was a minor inconvenience before, but now is a major problem since new commands won't show up to be edited until they have been moderated. . 2. White space in the description field and in the comments is almost completely lost. People resort to using periods in between paragraphs to force a line break. Indentation of code is ridiculous. . 3. Many characters get munged. . 3a. For example, a less than character in the description gets read as an HTML tag and discarded. In order to type a less than, I've had to type "<" (I hope that comes out right). Unfortunately, when re-editing a command, the HTML entity is turned into a literal less than character, which I have to change back by hand before saving. 3b. Some unicode characters work in the description field, but turn into ugly literal HTML strings when put in the sample output or in an additional command using the $ prefix. . For example, here is a unicode character: ❥ $ Here is the same character after a dollar sign: ❥ . 3c. Some unicode characters don't work anywhere. Bizarrely, it appears to be the most commonly needed ones, such as Latin-1 accented characters. Here are some examples, . Bullet: ?, Center dot: ?, Umlaut u: ?. . 4. Here is an example of the greater than, >, and less than,

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

Zip each file in a directory individually with the original file name
This will list the files in a directory, then zip each one with the original filename individually. video1.wmv -> video1.zip video2.wmv -> video2.zip This was for zipping up large amounts of video files for upload on a Windows machine.

RTFM function
Some commands have more information on 'info' than in the man pages


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: