Hide

What's this?

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

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 11,487 results
shred -v filename
2013-05-07 14:58:17
User: techie
Functions: shred
-5
Up
Down
Delete a file securely by overwriting its contents
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/speaker bs=1
2010-10-27 09:22:40
User: khashmeshab
Functions: dd
Tags: speaker beep random
-5
Up
Down
Random Beeps on Your PC Speaker

Sends random beeps to your PC-speaker. Think... You can also run it remotely on another computer using SSH and scare its user! Don't forget to run it on your dedicated hosting server and watch sysadmin's action from data-center's live remote cameras!

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
awk 'END {print NR}' /etc/passwd
2011-06-23 00:33:40
User: Leo_Gutierrez
Functions: awk
-5
Up
Down
How many lines does the passwd file have?
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/dsp
2010-10-27 09:25:02
User: khashmeshab
Functions: dd
Tags: speaker beep sound random
-5
Up
Down
Random Beeps on Your Audio Card's Output

Sends random sounds to your sound card output (e.g. your speaker). Think... You can also run it remotely on another computer using SSH and scare its user!

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo 1+1|bc
2009-02-19 13:46:58
User: gnawa
Functions: echo
-5
Up
Down
doing some math...
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
x=192.168.1.1; whois $x > $x.txt
2011-01-17 03:33:49
User: sxiii
Functions: whois
-5
Up
Down
Whois on target and save results to file instantly

This can be used in scripts, to find out the origin of target IP etc.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo -en "$USER@$HOSTNAME:${PWD##*/}> ";while read x;do echo $x>>/tmp/log.txt;echo $x|$0 2>&1;echo -en "$USER@$HOSTNAME:${PWD##*/}> ";done
2011-01-17 20:53:28
User: Nikon
Functions: echo read
-5
Up
Down
Bash logger
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
export var1=`ps -A | grep '[u]nique' | cut -d '?' -f 1`; echo${var1/ /}; kill -9 $var1
2010-03-22 21:06:58
User: headyadmin
Functions: cut export grep kill
Tags: Os X
-5
Up
Down
Kill process you don't know the PID of, when pidof and pgrep are not available.

This will kill a specific process you don't know the PID of, when pidof and pgrep are not available, for example on OS X. var1 is created so that the whitespace can be trimmed before passing off to kill.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
join file1.txt file2.txt > file3.txt
2009-03-01 05:12:07
User: olafrv
Functions: join
-6
Up
Down
Concatenate lines of to files, one by one
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
apt-get search something | grep specific
2010-09-27 07:10:39
User: ProfOak
Functions: apt grep
-6
Up
Down
Refined repository search

replace apt-get with your distro's package manager.

Where 'something' is the package name, and 'specific' is what you're specifically looking for.

This helps if your query is 2+ words long.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -A 3 -i "example" demo_text
2013-05-09 08:20:31
User: techie
Functions: grep
Tags: grep
-6
Up
Down
Print the matched line, along with the 3 lines after it.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
python -c "import socket; print '\n'.join(socket.gethostbyname_ex(socket.gethostname())[2])"
2009-04-30 16:10:43
User: haivu
Functions: python
Tags: Network python
-6
Up
Down
One-Liner to Display IP Addresses

The socket.gethostname() call returns the host name of the computer. The socket.gethostbyname_ex() call returns a list of three items: The host name, the list of aliases for this host, and a list of IP addresses. Recall that Python?s array starts with index 0, the socket.gethostbyname_ex(?)[2] expression refers to the list of IP addresses. Finally, the print statement prints out the IP addresses, one per line.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
curl whatismyip.org
2011-10-15 12:22:34
User: mathias
-6
Up
Down
What is my IP address?
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
nawk '{line[NR]=$0} END{for (; NR>=1; NR--){print line[NR]}}' FILENAME
2009-03-20 12:43:31
User: lme
-6
Up
Down
reverse-print contents of a file
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo dmesg
2009-08-19 11:06:05
User: theIndianMaiden
Functions: sudo
Tags: system_profiler
-6
Up
Down
detected hardware and boot messages
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in $(file * | grep broken | cut -d : -f 1); do rm $i; done
2010-11-02 16:10:42
User: Znuff
Functions: cut file grep rm
-6
Up
Down
remove all dead symbolic links in a directory
Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
scp -P 22 /home/svnlabs.txt root@92.178.0.56:/home/svnlabs.txt
2010-01-22 16:55:25
User: svnlabs
Functions: scp
-6
Up
Down
Upload file to remote server using SCP

Upload file to remote server using SCP

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
telnet zerocarbs.wooters.us
2010-06-26 05:50:48
User: wickedcpj
Functions: telnet
-6
Up
Down
Connects to a telnet service monitoring Woot!

Gives you an updating woot! item tracker!

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find ~/Desktop/ \( -regex '.*/\..*' \) -print -exec rm -Rf {} \;
2009-06-02 19:45:06
User: unixmonkey4063
Functions: find rm
Tags: hidden find
-6
Up
Down
Search for all files that begin with . and delete them.
Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
watch -n 1 uptime\;myqladmin --user=<user> --password=<password> --verbose processlist
2009-03-21 18:29:28
User: root
Functions: watch
Tags: mysql
-6
Up
Down
Monitor server load as well as running MySQL processes

Useful for monitoring both MySQL and the server load at the same time.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -ef | grep [j]boss | awk '{print $2}'|xargs kill -9
2010-09-30 15:55:41
User: utoxin
Functions: awk grep kill ps xargs
Tags: kill
-6
Up
Down
Kill any process with one command using program name

Removed unneeded grep -v by making the initial grep unable to match itself.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find Documents\ and\ Settings -iregex .+\.doc -or -iregex .+\.xls > office.lst
2010-11-04 17:58:52
User: yababay
Functions: find
-6
Up
Down
Find only *.doc and *xls files on Windows partition

This command is useful for archiving or extracting Documents and Settings folder, when working in Linux box with Windows partition (dual boot installation). You have to enter into appropriate directory, of course.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
pwgen -Bs 10 1
2013-05-16 10:50:00
User: techie
Tags: Security password sha256 /dev/urandom md5deep
-6
Up
Down
Create a secure password using /dev/urandom and sha256
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -l | grep ^l
2009-04-02 17:47:36
User: haivu
Functions: grep ls
Tags: ls
-6
Up
Down
Show All Symbolic (Soft) Links

Shows all linked file and destinations. The 'ls -l' command lists the files in long (1 file per line) format, and the grep command displays only those lines that starts with an l (lower case L) -- a linked file.

Updated: Remove reference to hard links because this command does not apply to hard link as others kindly pointed out.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed 's/$//'
2009-02-16 21:04:37
User: grep
Functions: sed
-6
Up
Down
convert DOS newlines to unix newlines
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate