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

power off system in X hours form the current time, here X=2

Find the package that installed a command

Connect-back shell using Bash built-ins
Connect-back shell using Bash built-ins. Useful in a web app penetration test, if it's the case of a locked down environment, without the need for file uploads or a writable directory. -- /dev/tcp and /dev/udb redirects must be enabled at compile time in Bash. Most Linux distros enable this feature by default but at least Debian is known to disable it. -- http://labs.neohapsis.com/2008/04/17/connect-back-shell-literally/

Display a cool clock on your terminal
This command displays a clock on your terminal which updates the time every second. Press Ctrl-C to exit. A couple of variants: A little bit bigger text: $ watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet -f big" You can try other figlet fonts, too. Big sideways characters: $ watch -n 1 -t '/usr/games/banner -w 30 $(date +%M:%S)' This requires a particular version of banner and a 40-line terminal or you can adjust the width ("30" here).

Resolve the "all display buffers are busy, please try later" error on a Foundry

Bash alias to output the current Swatch Internet Time
Output the current time in Swatch “Internet Time”, aka .beats. There are 1000 .beats in a day, and @0 is at 00:00 Central European Standard Time. This was briefly a thing in the late 1990s. More details: https://2020.swatch.com/en_ca/internet-time/ The alias is rather quote heavy to protect the subshell, so the bare command is: $ echo '@'$(TZ=GMT-1 date +'(%-S + %-M * 60 + %-H * 3600) / 86.4'|bc)

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Function to change prompt
Bash function to change your default prompt to something simpler and restore it to normal afterwards.

List your MACs address

print contents of file from line 1 until we match regex
Start printing the contents of filename to stdout, until a matching line to regex is found, then stop.


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: