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

Mount a disk image (dmg) file in Mac OSX
To unmount, replace "attach" with "eject"

finding cr-lf files aka dos files with ^M characters
Looking for carriage returns would also identify files with legacy mac line endings. To fix both types: $ perl -i -pe 's/\r\n?/\n/g' $(find . -type f -exec fgrep -l $'\r' "{}" \;)

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Simplest port scanner
Very handy way to perform a host scan if you don't have nmap,ncat,nc ...or other tools installed locally. When executing a command on a /dev/tcp/$host/$port pseudo-device file, Bash opens a TCP connection to the associated socket and UDP connection when using /dev/udp/$host/$port.A simlpe way to get servers banner is to run this command "cat < /dev/tcp/localhost/25" , here you will get mail server's banner. NOTE: Bash, as packaged for Debian, does not support using the /dev/tcp and /dev/udp pseudo-device it's not enabled by default Because bash in Debian is compiled with ?disable-net-redirections.

get the full description of a randomly selected package from the list of installed packages on a debian system
I put this command on my ~/.bashrc in order to learn something new about installed packages on my Debian/Ubuntu system each time I open a new terminal

FizzBuzz One-liner

add all files not under version control to repository
This should handle whitespaces well and will not get confused if your filenames have "?" in them

Phrack 66 is out, but the .tar.gz is not there yet on phrack.org's website
Nice reading in the morning on the way to work, but sadly the .tar.gz for the whole issue 66 is not on phrack's website yet. So use wget to download.

Remount root in read-write mode.
Saved my day, when my harddrive got stuck in read-only mode.

positions the mysql slave at a specific master position
say you want to reinitialize the slave database without resetting the master positions. You stop the slave, dump the master database with --master-data=2 then execute the command on the slave and wait for it to stop at the exact position of the dump. reinit the slave db and start the slave. enjoy.


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: