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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

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May 19, 2015 - A Look At The New Commandlinefu
I've put together a short writeup on what kind of newness you can expect from the next iteration of clfu. Check it out here.
March 2, 2015 - New Management
I'm Jon, I'll be maintaining and improving clfu. Thanks to David for building such a great resource!
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awk, bash, curl, find, grep, Linux, sed
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Maintained by Jon H.

Site originally by David Winterbottom (user root).

Psst. Open beta.

Wow, didn't really expect you to read this far down. The latest iteration of the site is in open beta. It's a gentle open beta-- not in prime-time just yet. It's being hosted over at UpGuard (link) and you are more than welcome to give it a shot. Couple things:

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Your feedback is appreciated via the form on the beta page. Thanks! -Jon & CLFU Team

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 12,362 results
runas /user:administrator net stop wuauserv
2009-06-30 09:29:03
User: oernii2
4
Up
Down
stop windows update

Windows only: stops windows update and the nagging restart window.

You need your admin password for this one.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
source ~/.bash_profile
2009-06-29 19:26:43
User: unixmonkey743
-6
Up
Down
reload bash_profile

when editing .bash_profile (or .bashrc), run this to use the new version without having to exit and open a new terminal

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat myfile.txt | tr -d '\n'
2009-06-29 12:49:08
User: Cowboy
Functions: cat tr
2
Up
Down
Trim linebreaks
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn log | tr -d '\n' | sed -r 's/-{2,}/\n/g' | sed -r 's/ \([^\)]+\)//g' | sed -r 's/^r//' | sed -r "s/[0-9]+ lines?//g" | sort -g
2009-06-29 12:48:30
User: Cowboy
Functions: sed sort tr
3
Up
Down
SVN Status log to CSV

Note you have also the --xml option ;)

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
? () { echo "$*" | bc -l; }
2009-06-28 20:15:30
User: fizz
Functions: bc echo
Tags: bash bc function calc bc -l
58
Up
Down
Define a quick calculator function

defines a handy function for quick calculations from cli.

once defined:

? 10*2+3
Show sample output | Comments (14) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in *;do mv "$i" "$(echo $i | sed s/PROBLEM/FIX/g)";done
2009-06-28 01:50:25
User: AlecSchueler
Functions: mv
Tags: bash sed mv rename encoding
3
Up
Down
Uniformly correct filenames in a directory

Useful if non-ascii characters in filenames have been improperly encoded. Replace "PROBLEM" with the incorrect characters (e.g. 'é'), and "FIX" with the correct ones (e.g. '?').

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
rename 'y/ /_/' *
2009-06-27 22:20:47
User: signal9
Functions: rename
Tags: file rename
57
Up
Down
replace spaces in filenames with underscores

This command will replace all the spaces in all the filenames of the current directory with underscores. There are other commands that do this here, but this one is the easiest and shortest.

Comments (10) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
curl -u YourUsername:YourPassword -d status="Your status message go here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
2009-06-27 21:47:48
User: m33600
Tags: twitter
2
Up
Down
Twitter update from terminal (pok3's snipts ?)

Found it on snipt, pok3, is it yours?

I put my user = m33600, the password and the status was my robot message:

Settima robot message: ALARM ZONE 3 (sent via command line).

Now bots may have their identity on twitter...

Show sample output | Comments (6) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
S=`pidof skype`;grep heap /proc/$S/maps|cut -f1 -d' '|awk -F- '{print "0x" $1 " 0x" $2}'|xargs echo "du me t ">l;gdb -batch -p $S -x l>/dev/null 2>&1;strings t|grep \(smirk|head -n1
2009-06-26 20:03:17
User: alvieboy
Functions: awk cut echo grep head xargs
0
Up
Down
Extract the emoticons regex from a running skype process

Skype has an internal regex which depicts the emoticons it supports. However you cannot simply search the binary file for it. This small 181 character line will do just that, provided skype is running. And of course, only works in linux.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
awk '/regex/{print x};{x=$0}'
2009-06-26 19:29:54
User: res0nat0r
Functions: awk
4
Up
Down
Print line immediately before a matching regex.

Use this if you don't have access to GNU grep's -B option.

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
:let i=0 | 'a,'bg/ZZZZ/s/ZZZZ/\=i/ | let i=i+1
2009-06-26 19:23:29
User: res0nat0r
Tags: vim
11
Up
Down
VIM: Replace a string with an incrementing number between marks 'a and 'b (eg, convert string ZZZZ to 1, 2, 3, ...)
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
( cd SOURCEDIR && tar cf - . ) | (cd DESTDIR && tar xvpf - )
2009-06-26 19:13:51
User: res0nat0r
Functions: cd tar
Tags: files
7
Up
Down
Move files around local filesystem with tar without wasting space using an intermediate tarball.
Comments (7) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
pax -r -s ',^/,,' -f file.tar
2009-06-26 19:10:57
User: res0nat0r
Functions: pax
Tags: tar
0
Up
Down
Untar file with absolute pathname to relative location

Don't have GNU tar installed that supports the redirect option (-C)? Use this.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find -L /proc/*/fd -links 0 2>/dev/null
2009-06-26 18:42:51
User: res0nat0r
Functions: find
Tags: du proc df
12
Up
Down
Find removed files still in use via /proc

Oracle DBA remove some logfiles which are still open by the database and he is complaining the space has not been reclaimed? Use the above command to find out what PID needs to be stopped. Or alternatively recover the file via:

cp /proc/pid/fd/filehandle /new/file.txt
Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
rsop.msc
2009-06-26 11:19:50
User: felix001
4
Up
Down
Show your account and windows policy settings with Results of Policy msc.

Type this into windows via run and it will display to you your complete policy for windows. This includes group policy, security policy and your active directory account (min password etc)....

www.fir3net.com

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
watch 'netstat -aniv'
2009-06-26 11:16:42
User: felix001
Functions: watch
2
Up
Down
Monitor RX/TX packets and any subsquent errors

www.fir3net.com

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
netstat -lnp
2009-06-26 08:33:03
User: unixmonkey4415
Functions: netstat
Tags: netstat
3
Up
Down
Most simple way to get a list of open ports
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | grep -v `whoami`
2009-06-26 08:28:06
User: unixmonkey4415
Functions: grep ps
Tags: Process Management
-4
Up
Down
Check processes runed not by you
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
pdftk $* cat output $merged.pdf
2009-06-26 07:36:02
User: svg
Functions: cat
3
Up
Down
Merge several pdf files into a single file
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo "Hello World." | tee -a hello.txt
2009-06-26 00:55:59
User: thebillywayne
Functions: echo tee
Tags: tee
1
Up
Down
bash or tcsh redirect both to stdout and to a file

When plumbers use pipes, they sometimes need a T-joint. The Unix equivalent to this is 'tee'. The -a flag tells 'tee' to append to the file, rather than clobbering it.

Tested on bash and tcsh.

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man fetchmail | perl -ne 'undef $/; print $1 if m/^.*?(-k \| --keep.*)-K \| --nokeep.*$/smg'
2009-06-25 23:51:35
User: unixmonkey4437
Functions: fetchmail man perl
0
Up
Down
Print multiline text starting and ending at specific regexps with perl

Using perl, here, we grep the man page of fetchmail to find the paragraph starting with '-k | --keep' and ending before the paragraph starting with '-K | --nokeep'

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo "aplay path/to/song" |at [time]
2009-06-25 19:33:37
User: brausen
Functions: at echo
Tags: alarm
8
Up
Down
Set an alarm to wake up [2]

Set an alarm to starts in specific time.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sleep 5h && rhythmbox path/to/song
2009-06-25 19:15:19
User: becomingGuru
Functions: sleep
3
Up
Down
Set an alarm to wake up

Sleep 5h and plays the song as a wake up alarm

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf a.pdf b.pdf c.pdf
2009-06-25 19:04:28
User: becomingGuru
Functions: gs
5
Up
Down
Merge several pdf files into a single file

merge a.pdf b.pdf and c.pdf and create ./out.pdf

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
su - <user> -s /bin/sh -c "/bin/sh"
2009-06-25 15:36:04
User: nablas
Functions: su
Tags: shell
3
Up
Down
Get a shell with a not available account
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate