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

Quickly generate an MD5 hash for a text string using OpenSSL
Thanks to OpenSSL, you can quickly and easily generate MD5 hashes for your passwords. Alternative (thanks to linuxrawkstar and atoponce): $ echo -n 'text to be encrypted' | md5sum - Note that the above method does not utlise OpenSSL.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Lines per second in a log file
Another way of counting the line output of tail over 10s not requiring pv. Cut to have the average per second rate : tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 10; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2 You can also enclose it in a loop and send stderr to /dev/null : while true; do tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 2; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2; done 2>/dev/null

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Remove all subversion files from a project recursively
This command will remove all .svn folder from your project if you need to manual remove the subversion files.

reset Mageia urpmi media sources to network only
On Mageia (and Mandriva) Linux, this command will clear your existing urpmi configuration and configure it to use only network sources. It can be useful after you have installed from CD/DVD and don't want to continually be prompted to insert CD/DVD each time you install a package. acknowledgement: blino

sort the contents of a text file in place.
sorts the contents of a file without the need for a second file to take the sorted output. This was previously entered as `sort -g list.txt -o $_` but as others have pointed out the $_ references the previous command. so this would've worked had that been the second part of a command joined with && like: cat list.txt && sort -g list.txt -o $_ The user below me Robin had the most correct command.

Say something out loud
Whatever arguments you pass will be spoken out loud. (Put it in a script or shell function.)

View all date formats, Quick Reference Help Alias
If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command. # creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com $ ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/`date +git-$USER@$HOSTNAME-%m-%d-%g` -C 'webmaster@askapache.com' $ # /home/gpl/.ssh/git-gplnet@askapache.github.com-04-22-10 # create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory $ tar -czf $(date +$HOME/.backups/%m-%d-%g-%R-`sed -u 's/\//#/g'

List the binaries installed by a Debian package
GNU grep's perl-compatible regular expression(PCRE).


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: