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

use SHIFT + ALT to toggle between two keyboard layouts
change the last two-character abbreviation to any layout abbreviation you want. This command will only run in the current session, add to your ~/.bashrc to make this permanent.

commandline dictionary
Note: 1) Replace 'wonder' with any word you looking the meaning for in the above example 2) Need to install these packages: wordnet & wordnet-base (latter should be automatically installed because of dependency) 3) Combined size of packages is about 30MB on my old ubuntu system (I find it worth it)

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

Bash alias for creating screen session containing IRSSI, named irssi, while checking if existing session is created
Bash alias for easy irssi within screen, attempts to attach to existing irssi session, if one exists, otherwise creates one - Including wipe for when system reboots and leaves "dead" session.

List alive hosts in specific subnet
Works on any machine with nmap installed. Previous version does not work on machines without "seq". Also works on subnets of any size.

Fix for error perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
Fix for ubuntu error: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = "en_GB:en", LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_GB.UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Make a DVD ISO Image from a VIDEO_TS folder on MacOSX
/path/ is the root folder of the DVD, not the VIDEO_TS folder.

Realtime lines per second in a log file
Using tail to follow and standard perl to count and print the lps when lines are written to the logfile.

Generate a random password 30 characters long
According to the gpg(1) manual: --gen-random 0|1|2 count Emit count random bytes of the given quality level 0, 1 or 2. If count is not given or zero, an endless sequence of random bytes will be emitted. If used with --armor the output will be base64 encoded. PLEASE, don't use this command unless you know what you are doing; it may remove precious entropy from the system! If your entropy pool is critical for various operations on your system, then using this command is not recommended to generate a secure password. With that said, regenerating entropy is as simple as: $ du -s / This is a quick way to generate a strong, base64 encoded, secure password of arbitrary length, using your entropy pool (example above shows a 30-character long password).

network interface and routing summary


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: