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 - 11,584 results
sed '${LINE}d' ~/.ssh/known_host
2012-01-16 18:00:12
User: lucasrangit
Functions: sed
-5
Up
Down
Remove a line from a file using sed (useful for updating known SSH server keys when they change)

When you SSH to a server who's hostname or IP has changed since the last time a connection was recorded in the known_hosts file a warning will be displayed since this indicated a possible DNS spoofing attack. If this is a known change then this command will remove the previous entry and allow the SSH connection. The SSH client will prompt you as if it was the first time connected to the server.

Replace ${LINE} with the line of the offending key in ~known_hosts. 49 in the sample output.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo "13" | ed /etc/services
2011-09-15 19:37:49
User: muonIT
Functions: echo ed
Tags: goto
-5
Up
Down
Go to the Nth line of file

Nth line of a file - dirty hack way. I haven't used ed in ages ;-)

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo "<your twit>" | wc -c -
2010-08-02 03:35:54
User: jyro
Functions: echo wc
Tags: twitter wc
-5
Up
Down
Count your Twit length before posting
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
head -n 13 /etc/services | tail -n 1
2011-09-15 19:39:49
User: muonIT
Functions: head tail
Tags: goto
-5
Up
Down
Go to the Nth line of file

Silly approach, but easy to remember...

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -1rSA | tail
2009-10-27 15:34:59
User: rbossy
Functions: ls
-5
Up
Down
Get the 10 biggest files/folders for the current direcotry

This will only work on files since ls won't tell the size of a directory contents.

Note that the first switch is the digit one, not the letter ell.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find ./ -mtime -5 | xargs rm -f
2009-03-23 21:00:45
User: skye
Functions: find rm xargs
Tags: delete
-5
Up
Down
Delete all files in current directory that have been modified less than 5 days ago.
Comments (8) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
alias agi='sudo apt-get install'
2009-02-07 22:07:16
User: hide1713
Functions: alias
-5
Up
Down
Fast install software in Ubuntu
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cd /example/directory && unzip \*.zip
2009-07-12 21:45:13
User: Paaskehare
Functions: cd
-5
Up
Down
unzip all .zip files in /example/directory

Simple but useful little command to unzip all files in a directory.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tar --exclude='.svn' -c -f /path/to/file.tar /path/to/directory
2009-04-08 13:25:32
User: unixmonkey3142
Functions: tar
Tags: svn tar
-5
Up
Down
Tar a subversion working copy...without all those hidden directories!
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for f in `jot - 0 50 5` ; do ping -c 1 -m 50 10.0.2.$f ; done
2009-03-23 23:51:18
User: chinkshady
Functions: ping
-5
Up
Down
sequence of numbers in a for loop

Say you need to ping every 5th IP address on your network .. this will give you a way of doing that.

jot can also do counting ... like

jot 4

1

2

3

4

download from http://oreilly.com/catalog/upt2/examples/#jot or fins athena-jot in rpm format

Show sample output | Comments (7) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
kill %1
2009-04-09 11:54:13
User: prayer
Functions: kill
Tags: bash
-5
Up
Down
Kill a background job
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls .??*
2009-09-29 14:40:37
User: Paula
Functions: ls
-5
Up
Down
List dot-files and dirs, but not . or ..

Works 99.9% of the time; so far never required a more complex expression in manual input.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
curl -u username --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | perl -ne 'print "\t" if /<name>/; print "$2\n" if /<(title|name)>(.*)<\/\1>/;
2009-09-09 23:25:05
User: suxer
Functions: perl
-5
Up
Down
Checks your unread Gmail from the command line

notice what happens when there is more than one unread message in a thread...

also people please dont hardcode the password when you use curl. Leave it out and curl will ask you when it runs. Please...?

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo service vpnclient_init start
2010-11-10 20:18:08
User: mariusbutuc
Functions: sudo
Tags: VPN CISCO
-5
Up
Down
Starting the VPN service

Prerequisites:

[1] download the CISCO VPN client for linux: http://tuxx-home.at/archives/2007/09/24/T15_26_49/

[2] apply this ciscpo VPN patch: http://bit.ly/linux_vpn_patch

[*] use command to start client

[*+1] After copying your profile file to /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles, connect using

vpnclient connect TORVPN-TCP
Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
egrep -in "this|that" *.dat
2011-07-06 09:42:26
User: evandrix
Functions: egrep
-5
Up
Down
grep: find in files

grep - Search file for character string

Search for one or more strings in one or more files. Examples:-

grep that myfile.txt

Look for the string ``that'' in the file called ``myfile.txt'' and print out each line that matches.

egrep -in "this|that" *.dat

Extended grep search *.dat files for ``this'' or ``that'' case insensitive (-i) and where found print line number (-n) along with the line contents.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;
2010-02-26 10:54:02
User: ivanatora
Functions: find rm
Tags: vim find
-5
Up
Down
Remove VIM temp files

Assuming only VIM has *~ files in your current dir. If you have usefull data in a file named in the *~ pattern, DO NOT RUN this command!

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
fdisk -l /dev/sda
2012-06-05 10:17:54
User: netaxiz
Functions: fdisk
-5
Up
Down
See size of partitions
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | awk '/name/ {print $2}'
2009-02-20 21:35:52
User: evil_otto
Functions: awk ps
-5
Up
Down
find a process id by name

This finds a process id by name, but without the extra grep that you usually see. Remember, awk can grep too!

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cd //
2009-02-08 06:51:57
User: wbx
Functions: cd
-5
Up
Down
change directory into '//'

Please see sample output.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find ~ -mtime +365 -exec mv {} /tmp/mybackup \;
2009-04-11 12:16:48
User: kayowas
Functions: find mv
-5
Up
Down
exec option in find

This example uses the -exec option to move all matching files into a backup directory

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
perl -e 'map { $on=$_; s/\]/_/; rename($on, $_) or warn $!; } <*>;'
2009-06-11 10:09:54
User: fo0
Functions: perl
-5
Up
Down
Replace square brackets to underscore in all filenames (current dir.)
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
gcc -x c -o /tmp/out - -lgmp <<< '#include <stdlib.h> ... SEE SAMPLE OUTPUT FOR FULL COMMAND
2009-09-10 02:10:46
User: hank
Functions: c++ gcc
-5
Up
Down
The 1 millionth fibonacci number

It's hard to beat C. This is just slightly faster than the bc version on my machine.

real 0m26.856s

user 0m25.030s

sys 0m0.024s

Requirements: libgmp headers, gcc.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps ax | grep <processname> | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | sudo xargs kill -9
2009-03-24 19:52:47
User: copyhacker
Functions: awk grep kill ps sudo xargs
-5
Up
Down
Kill a bunch of processes with the same name
Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
2012-01-22 15:39:49
User: dudko
Functions: dd
-5
Up
Down
Completly blank a disk
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat files |sed 's/.\(.*\)/\1/'
2012-12-06 22:59:16
User: bugmenot
Functions: cat sed
-5
Up
Down
Remove the first character of each line in a file

http://www.ivorde.ro/How_to_remove_first_last_character_from_a_string_using_SED-75.html

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate