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 mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Stream YouTube URL directly to mplayer.
This is the result of a several week venture without X. I found myself totally happy without X (and by extension without flash) and was able to do just about anything but watch YouTube videos... so this a the solution I came up with for that. I am sure this can be done better but this does indeed work... and tends to work far better than YouTube's ghetto proprietary flash player ;-) Replace $i with any YouTube ID you want and this will scrape the site for the _real_ URL to the full quality .FLV file on Youtube's server and will then will hand that over to mplayer (or vlc or whatever you want) to be streamed. In some browsers you can replace $i with just a % or put this in a shell script so all YouTube IDs can be handed directly off to your media player of choice for true streaming without the need for Flash or a downloader like clive. (I do however fully recommend clive if you wish to archive videos instead of streaming them) If any interest is shown I would be more than happy to provide similar commands for other sites. Most streaming flash players use similar logic to YouTube. Edit: 05/03/2011 - Updated line to work with current YouTube. It could be a lot prettier but I will probably follow up with another update when I figure out how to get rid of that pesky Grep. Sed should take that syntax... but it doesn't. Original (no longer working) command: mplayer -fs $(echo "http://youtube.com/get_video.php?$(curl -s $youtube_url | sed -n "/watch_fullscreen/s;.*\(video_id.\+\)&title.*;\1;p")")

Securely destroy data (including whole hard disks)
GNU shred is provided by the coreutils package on most Linux distribution (meaning, you probably have it installed already), and is capable of wiping a device to DoD standards. You can give shred any file to destroy, be it your shell history or a block device file (/dev/hdX, for IDE hard drive X, for example). Shred will overwrite the target 25 times by default, but 3 is enough to prevent most recovery, and 7 passes is enough for the US Department of Defense. Use the -n flag to specify the number of passes, and man shred for even more secure erasing fun. Note that shredding your shell history may not be terribly effective on devices with journaling filesystems, RAID copies or snapshot copies, but if you're wiping a single disk, none of that is a concern. Also, it takes quite a while :)

Help shell find freshly installed applications (re: PATH)
Immediately after installing things into your PATH (e.g. under /usr/bin), currently open shells cannot find them ("zsh: command not found"). Use rehash to get the shell to rescan available executables.

cpu and memory usage top 10 under Linux
It's like `prstat -t` under Solaris

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"

Remove CR LF from a text file
Remove CR LF (CRLF) from a text file. use man:tr to get more info about removing other characters from a file. and even character to character replacements.

A command line calculator in Perl
Once I wrote a command line calculator program in C, then I found this... and added to it a bit. For ease of use I normally use this in a tiny Perl program (which I call pc for 'Perl Calculator') #!/usr/bin/perl -w die "Usage: $0 MATHS\n" unless(@ARGV);for(@ARGV){s/x/*/g;s/v/sqrt /g;s/\^/**/g}; print eval(join('',@ARGV)),$/; It handles square roots, power, modulus: $ pc 1+2 (1 plus 2) 3 $ pc 3x4 (3 times 4) 12 $ pc 5^6 (5 to the power of 6) 15625 $ pc v 49 ( square root of 49 ) 7 $ pc 12/3 (12 divided by 3) 4 $ pc 19%4 (19 modulus 4) 3 (you can string maths together too) $ pc 10 x 10 x 10 1000 $ pc 10 + 10 + 10 / 2 25 $ pc 7 x v49 49

Batch rename extension of all files in a folder, in the example from .txt to .md

Create executable, automountable filesystem in a file, with password!
This is just a proof of concept: A FILE WHICH CAN AUTOMOUNT ITSELF through a SIMPLY ENCODED script. It takes advantage of the OFFSET option of mount, and uses it as a password (see that 9191? just change it to something similar, around 9k). It works fine, mounts, gets modified, updated, and can be moved by just copying it. USAGE: SEE SAMPLE OUTPUT The file is composed of three parts: a) The legible script (about 242 bytes) b) A random text fill to reach the OFFSET size (equals PASSWORD minus 242) c) The actual filesystem Logically, (a)+(b) = PASSWORD, that means OFFSET, and mount uses that option. PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS NOT AN ENCRYPTED FILESYSTEM. To improve it, it can be mounted with a better encryption script and used with encfs or cryptfs. The idea was just to test the concept... with one line :) It applies the original idea of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/7382/command-for-john-cons for encrypting the file. The embedded bash script can be grown, of course, and the offset recalculation goes fine. I have my own version with bash --init-file to startup a bashrc with a well-defined environment, aliases, variables.


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: