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

find unreadable file

Clean swap area after using a memory hogging application
When you run a memory intensive application (VirtualBox, large java application, etc) swap area is used as soon as memory becomes insufficient. After you close the program, the data in swap is not put back on memory and that decreases the responsiveness. Swapoff disables the swap area and forces system to put swap data be placed in memory. Since running without a swap area might be detrimental, swapon should be used to activate swap again. Both swapoff and swapon require root privileges.

renames multiple files that match the pattern
Useful when you want to quickly rename a bunch of files.

Sync the existing directory structure to destination, without transferring any files

Search Google

Sorted list of established destination connections
no need grep. its redundant when awk is present.

Pulls total current memory usage, including SWAP being used, by all active processes.

Grab mp3 files from your favorite netcasts, mp3blog, or sites that often have good mp3s
This was gotten from http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000573.html. The line will grab all the mp3 files on the urls listed in text file sourceurls.txt (one url per line) . A much more complete breakdown of the line can be found at the web site mentioned above.

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

Sort a character string
using perl


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: