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

See system users

List of reverse DNS records for a subnet
This command uses nmap to perform reverse DNS lookups on a subnet. It produces a list of IP addresses with the corresponding PTR record for a given subnet. You can enter the subnet in CDIR notation (i.e. /24 for a Class C)). You could add "--dns-servers x.x.x.x" after the "-sL" if you need the lookups to be performed on a specific DNS server. On some installations nmap needs sudo I believe. Also I hope awk is standard on most distros.

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

display typedefs, structs, unions and functions provided by a header file
will display typedefs, structs, unions and functions declared in 'stdio.h'(checkout _IO_FILE structure). It will be helpful if we want to know what a particular header file will offer to us. Command 'cpp' is GNU's C Preprocessor.

restoring some data from a corrupted text file
man tac When there is a bad block in the middle of your file, you can see its begninning with `cat' and its end with `tac'. But both commands terminates with an error. So this sequence rebuilds a new file without badblock.

Find the dates your debian/ubuntu packages were installed.
Find when debian packages were installed on a system.

Donwload media from *.rm from an url of type htttp://.../*.ram

Connect via SSH to VirtualBox guest VM without knowing IP address
Booting the VM headless via VBoxHeadless requires knowledge of the VM's network in order to connect. Using VBoxManage in this way and you can SSH to the VM without first looking up the current IP, which changes depending on how you have your VM configured.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Get your outgoing IP address


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: