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

Decrypt passwords from Google Chrome and Chromium.
Read this before you down voting and comment that it is not working -> Wont work on latest versions ~75> since database file is locked and has to be decrypted. This is useful if you have an old hdd with a chrome installation and want to decrypt your old passwords fast.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Execute a file in vim with the #!/bin/interpreter in the first line

Anti DDOS
Takes IP from web logs and pipes to iptables, use grep to white list IPs.. use if a particular file is getting requested by many different addresses. Sure, its already down pipe and you bandwidth may suffer but that isnt the concern. This one liner saved me from all the traffic hitting the server a second time, reconfigure your system so your system will work like blog-post-1.php or the similar so legitimate users can continue working while the botnet kills itself.

List your interfaces and MAC addresses

Displays the current time using HTTP
This command will show the current GMT time using HTTP. This might be useful if you just want to know what's the current human-readable and accurate-enough time, without changing the system time, using a simple command that would work regardless of the availability of NTP. Note: To get a quicker and more accurate response, replace google.com with your local NTP server. Also can be used as an alternative to the "htpdate" program: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/668/set-your-computers-clock-using-http-and-htp-http-time-protocol-when-ntpsntp-is-not-available

converts a directory full of source tarballs into a bzr repository so you can compare different versions easily

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

find files containing text
-l outputs only the file names -i ignores the case -r descends into subdirectories


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: