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

Send keypresses to an X application
This is a (last resort) way to automate applications that provide no other ways for automation, it would send 'Hello world' to the currently active window. See the manpage (and the -text and -window entries) for how to send special characters and target specific windows. An example: Using xwininfo, I get the id of my XPlanet background window: alanceil@kvirasim:19:51:0:~> xwininfo xwininfo: Please select the window about which you would like information by clicking the mouse in that window. xwininfo: Window id: 0x3600001 "Xplanet 1.2.0" Absolute upper-left X: 0 (..etc..) Now I use xvkbd to tell it to close itself: xvkbd -xsendevent -window 0x3600001 -text "Q" Obviously, the best way is to put these commands in a shellscript - just make sure to include a short sleep (sleep .1 should suffice) after each xvkbd call, or some programs will become confused.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

nice disk usage, sorted by size, see description for full command
full command below, would not let me put full command in text box du -sk ./* | sort -nr | awk 'BEGIN{ pref[1]="K"; pref[2]="M"; pref[3]="G";} { total = total + $1; x = $1; y = 1; while( x > 1024 ) { x = (x + 1023)/1024; y++; } printf("%g%s\t%s\n",int(x*10)/10,pref[y],$2); } END { y = 1; while( total > 1024 ) { total = (total + 1023)/1024; y++; } printf("Total: %g%s\n",int(total*10)/10,pref[y]); }'

search installed files of package, that doesn't remember his name well. On rpm systems
rpm, sometimes, is not wildcard friendly. To search files installed from package this could be useful. change PACKAGENAME to any package do you want to search

Search $PATH for a command or something similar
Searches your $PATH for whatever you substitute for bash, though not sure if this will work if you substitute a different shell for bash!

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

Show the total number of changes that every user committed to a Subversion repository
This saves Subversion's log output as XML and then runs an XQuery over it. This is standard XQuery 1.0 and should therefore also work with other XQuery processors. I have tested it with Zorba (http://www.zorba-xquery.com). XQilla (http://xqilla.sourceforge.net) also does it, but you'd have to save the query to a file and then execute "xqilla filename.xq". The query first finds all distinct authors and then, for each author, sums up the number of paths they have changed in each commit. This accounts for commits of multiple changes at once. The indenting space in all lines from the second one seems to be due to a bug in Zorba.

Use QEMU to create a hardware dual-boot without rebooting
After downloading an ISO image, assuming you have QEMU installed, it’s possible to boot an ISO image in a virtual machine and then install that ISO from within the virtual machine directly to a physical drive, bypassing the need to reboot. Simply pass the ISO image as the -cdrom parameter, followed by “format=raw,file=/dev/sdb” (replace /dev/sdb with the drive you want to install to) as the hard drive parameter (making absolutely certain to specify the raw format, of course). Once you boot into the ISO image with QEMU, just run the installer as if it were a virtual machine — it’ll just use the physical device as an install target. After that, you’ll be able to seamlessly boot multiple distros (or even other operating systems) at once.

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

Calculating series with awk: add numbers from 1 to 100
"seq 100" outputs 1,2,..,100, separated by newlines. awk adds them up and displays the sum. "seq 1 2 11" outputs 1,3,..,11. Variations: 1+3+...+(2n-1) = n^2 $ seq 1 2 19 | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum}' # displays 100 1/2 + 1/4 + ... = 1 $ seq 10 | awk '{sum+=1/(2**$1)} END {print sum}' # displays 0.999023


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: