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

Create a file of a given size in linux
If you're trying to create a sparse file, you can use dd by 'skip'ing to the last block instance. ls -ls shows the actual size vs. the reported size

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.

Listing today’s files only

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files
No need to loop when we have `xargs`. The sed command filters out the first line of `show databases` output, which is always "Database".

send incoming audio to a Icecast server (giss.tv)
easy way to setup an "internet radio sation", pre-requisite, create an account at an icecast server, in this example, just created beforehand an account at giss.tv. Change the word password, with the respective real password you created at server. Make sure to have installed rec, oggnec, oggfwd and tee. I have a mixer connected at line in, so I can mix music and microphone. This also will produce a local recorded copy of the session, it will be called "streamdump.ogg"

Shows cpu load in percent
Show the current load of the CPU as a percentage. Read the load from /proc/loadavg and convert it using sed: Strip everything after the first whitespace: $ sed -e 's/ .*//' Delete the decimal point: $ sed -e 's/\.//' Remove leading zeroes: $ sed -e 's/^0*//'

Salvage a borked terminal
Also works in places where reset does not.

Change Windows Domain password from Linux
If you use Linux in a Windows domain and there are N days to expiry, this is how you can change it without resorting to a windows machine.

how to export a table in .csv file
Exports the result of query in a csv file

Share a terminal screen with others
If you enable multiuser, then you can permit others to share your screen session. The following conditions apply: 1. screen must be suid root; 2. "multiuser on" must be configured in ~/.screenrc; 3. control the others user(s) access with "aclchg": # ----- from ~/.screenrc-users ----- aclchg someuser +rx "#?" #enable r/o access to "someuser" aclchg someuser -x "#,at,aclchg,acladd,acldel,quit" # don't allow these aclchg otheruser +rwx "#?" # enable r/w access to "otheruser" aclchg otheruser -x "#,at,aclchg,acladd,acldel,quit" # don't allow them to use these commands # ----- After doing this (once), you start your session with: $ screen Then, the other user can join your terminal session(s) with youruserid: $ screen -r youruserid/ Note: the trailing "/" is required. Multiple users can share the same screen simultaneously, each with independent access controlled precisely with "aclchg" in the ~/.screenrc file. I use the following setup: # ~/.screenrc-base # default screenrc on any host source $HOME/.screenrc-base source $HOME/.screenrc-$HOST source $HOME/.screenrc-users # ----- Then, the base configurations are in ~/.screenrc-base; the host-specific configurations are in ~/.screenrc-$HOST, and the user configurations are in ~/.screenrc-users. The host-specific .screenrc file might contain some host-specific screen commands; e.g.: # ~/.screen-myhost # ----- screen -t 'anywhere' /bin/tcsh screen -t 'anywhere1' /bin/tcsh # ---- The .screenrc-base contains: # ~/.screenrc-base ## I find typing ^a (Control-a) awkward. So I set the escape key to CTRL-j instead of a. escape ^Jj termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@: autodetach on zombie kr verbose on multiuser on


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: