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

Tail postfix current maillog and grep for "criteria"
Tail curren postfix maillog.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Copy your ssh public key to a server from a machine that doesn't have ssh-copy-id
This one is a bit more robust -- the remote machine may not have an .ssh directory, and it may not have an authorized_keys file, but if it does already, and you want to replace your ssh public key for some reason, this will work in that case as well, without duplicating the entry.

Find and copy scattered mp3 files into one directory
No problem with word splitting. That should works on many Unix likes.

Summary of disk usage, excluding other filesystems, summarised and sorted by size
This command is useful for finding out which directories below the current location use the most space. It is summarised by directory and excludes mounted filesystems. Finally it is sorted by size.

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

rename a file to its md5sum

Recursively compare two directories and output their differences on a readable format

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Edit video by cutting the part you like without transcoding.
Examples: The following will take frames starting at 15.2 seconds for a total of 45.9 seconds: $ mencoder -ss 15.2 -endpos 30.7 -oac copy -ovc copy mymovie.avi -o myeditedmovie.avi Keep in mind -endpos is the total time, i.e. the output video in this is 3 minutes 3 seconds in length: $ mencoder -ss 1 minute -endpos 2 minutes 3 seconds -oac copy -ovc copy mymovie.avi -o myeditedmovie.avi


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: