All commands sorted by votes | commandlinefu.com

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

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:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)

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

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Terminal - All commands - 11,492 results

git rev-list --reverse HEAD | awk "/$(git log -n 1 --pretty="format:%h")/ {print NR}"

2011-11-15 21:49:32

User: atoponce

Functions: awk

Tags: git awk

-1

Up
Down

Sequential revision numbers in Git

Git uses secure hash sums for its revision numbers. I'm sure this is fine and dandy for ultra-secure computing, but it's less than optimal for humans. Thus, this will give you sequential revision numbers in Git all the way from the first commit.

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

2012-05-08 13:28:25

User: theist

Functions: cat grep perl sort uniq

Tags: sort uniq geoip

-1

Up
Down

Per country GET report, based on access log. Easy to transform to unique IP

genpassdeep() { cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc [:alnum:] | head -c64 | sha256deep; echo; }

2012-11-09 00:33:22

User: malathion

Functions: cat head tr

Tags: Security password sha256 /dev/urandom md5deep

-1

Up
Down

Create a secure password using /dev/urandom and sha256

/dev/urandom relies on operator input to set the random seed. By itself, this may not contain enough random bits to produce high entropy output, especially if the system was recently restarted. Therefore, key stretching through a hash reduces the risk of using low-entropy output as a security key.

kill -HUP `ps -A -ostat,ppid,pid,cmd | grep -e '^[Zz]' | awk '{print $2}'`

2009-02-06 02:42:14

User: liupeng

Functions: awk grep kill

-1

Up
Down

find and kill a zombie process

You cannot kill zombies, as they are already dead. But if you have too many zombies then kill parent process or restart service.

You can kill zombie process using PID obtained from the above command. For example kill zombie proces having PID 4104:

# kill -9 4104

Please note that kill -9 does not guarantee to kill a zombie process.

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

HISTTIMEFORMAT='' history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head > /tmp/cmds ; gnuplot -persist <<<'plot "/tmp/cmds" using 1:xticlabels(2) with boxes'

2010-06-17 17:38:16

User: narcelio

Functions: awk head sort

-1

Up
Down

List of commands you use most often

This alternative cleans HISTTIMEFORMAT environment variable and calls gnuplot just after /tmp/cmds is closed, to avoid some errors.

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

xmlproc_parse.python-xml &>/dev/null <FILE> || exit 1

2009-12-11 17:30:03

User: sputnick

Functions: exit

Tags: python xml

-1

Up
Down

validate xml in a shell script.

For debian likes, that's in python-xml package.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

tail() { thbin="/usr/bin/tail"; if [ "${1:0:1}" != "-" ]; then fc=$(($#==0?1:$#)); lpf="$((($LINES - 3 - 2 * $fc) / $fc))"; lpf="$(($lpf<1?2:$lpf))"; [ $fc -eq 1 ] && $thbin -n $lpf "$@" | /usr/bin/fold -w $COLUMNS | $thbin -n $lpf || $thbin -n $lpf...

2012-03-23 19:00:30

User: fpunktk

Functions: tail

Tags: bash tail variable

-1

Up
Down

a tail function for automatic smart output

tail() { thbin="/usr/bin/tail"; if [ "${1:0:1}" != "-" ]; then fc=$(($#==0?1:$#)); lpf="$((($LINES - 3 - 2 * $fc) / $fc))"; lpf="$(($lpf<1?2:$lpf))"; [ $fc -eq 1 ] && $thbin -n $lpf "$@" | /usr/bin/fold -w $COLUMNS | $thbin -n $lpf || $thbin -n $lpf "$@"; else $thbin "$@"; fi; unset lpf fc thbin; }

This is a function that implements an improved version of tail. It tries to limit the number of lines so that the screen is filled completely. It works with pipes, single and multiple files. If you add different options to tail, they will overwrite the settings from the function.

It doesn't work very well when too many files (with wrapped lines) are specified.

Its optimised for my three-line prompt.

It also works for head. Just s/tail/head/g

Don't set 'thbin="tail"', this might lead to a forkbomb.

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

qlmanage -p "yourfilename"

2009-02-16 07:15:03

User: vaporub

-1

Up
Down

OS-X... create a quick look from the command line

Where "docname" is the document you want OS-X to image... file.txt, file.pdf, file.mov, etc

cvlc <somemusic.mp3>

2011-03-25 20:03:19

User: dynaguy

-1

Up
Down

Playback music in VLC without the GUI interface

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

while :; do :; done

2012-03-23 19:06:56

User: livibetter

-1

Up
Down

CPU sucker

Use one CPU core entirely.

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

ifconfig | awk -F"[: ]+" '/inet addr/ {print $4}'

2012-07-16 07:48:33

User: saibbot

Functions: awk ifconfig

Tags: ifconfig

-1

Up
Down

Get the IP address

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

write user anytext

2009-02-27 18:58:36

User: mahendra

Functions: write

-1

Up
Down

sending message to a logined user of group

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

find . -exec grep foobar /dev/null {} \; | awk -F: '{print $1}' | xargs vi

2009-09-03 16:02:18

User: verboEse

Functions: awk find grep xargs

Tags: vim awk find grep

-1

Up
Down

Edit all files found having a specific string found by grep

needs no GNU tools, as far as I see it

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

mp32ogg file.mp3

2009-11-16 20:22:48

User: nickleus

-1

Up
Down

convert mp3 to ogg

why would you want to convert mp3's to ogg? 1 reason is because ardour doesn't support mp3 files because of legal issues. this is really the only reason you would do this, unless you have really bad hearing and also want smaller file sizes, because converting from one lossy format to another isn't a good idea.

jot -b '#' -s '' $COLUMNS

2010-04-13 22:03:39

User: dennisw

Tags: tr tput printf

-1

Up
Down

Print a row of characters across the terminal

For BSD-based systems, including OS X, that don't have seq.

This version provides a default using tput in case $COLUMNS is not set:

jot -b '#' -s '' ${COLUMNS:-$(tput cols)}

find / -type f -size +512000 | xargs ls -lh | awk '{ print $5 " " $6$7 ": " $9 }'

2010-05-12 17:21:12

User: johnss

Functions: awk find ls xargs

-1

Up
Down

Find all files over a set size and displays accordingly

This is an updated version that some one provided me via another "find" command to find files over a certain size. Keep in mind you may have to mess around with the print values depending on your system to get the correct output you want. This was tested on FC and Cent based servers. (thanks to berta for the update)

net user USERNAME /domain

2014-01-02 20:22:46

User: shawn_abdushakur

Tags: windows

-1

Up
Down

Show all groups user is a member of and other useful info

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

wget -r --wait=5 --quota=5000m --tries=3 --directory-prefix=/home/erin/Documents/erins_webpages --limit-rate=20k --level=1 -k -p -erobots=off -np -N --exclude-domains=del.icio.us,doubleclick.net -F -i ./delicious-20090629.htm

2009-07-02 01:46:21

User: bbelt16ag

Functions: wget

-1

Up
Down

my command for downloading delicious web links,

just a alternative using a saved html file of all of my bookmarks. works well although it takes awhile.

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

cat /proc/cpuinfo

This is sample output - yours may be different.

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 37
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU         530  @ 2.93GHz
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 2926.109
cache size      : 4096 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 4
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 0
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 11
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc nonstop_tsc arat pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm
bogomips        : 5852.21
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: [8]

processor       : 1
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 37
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU         530  @ 2.93GHz
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 2926.109
cache size      : 4096 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 4
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 1
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 11
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc nonstop_tsc arat pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm
bogomips        : 5851.94
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: [8]

processor       : 2
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 37
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU         530  @ 2.93GHz
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 2926.109
cache size      : 4096 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 4
core id         : 2
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 4
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 11
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc nonstop_tsc arat pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm
bogomips        : 5851.94
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: [8]

processor       : 3
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 37
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU         530  @ 2.93GHz
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 2926.109
cache size      : 4096 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 4
core id         : 2
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 5
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 11
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc nonstop_tsc arat pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm
bogomips        : 5851.95
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: [8]

2010-09-24 09:27:58

User: magicjohnson_

Functions: cat

Tags: bash cpuinfo

-1

Up
Down

CPU architecture details

It works in every linux box

ash prod<tab>

2012-05-12 19:51:02

User: c3w

Tags: ssh screen osx json ruby

-1

Up
Down

OSX Terminal helper with tab completion, ssh tunneling, and now screen re-attach

http://github.com/c3w/ash

. a Ruby SSH helper script

. reads a JSON config file to read host, FQDN, user, port, tunnel options

. changes OSX Terminal profiles based on host 'type'

USAGE:

put 'ash' ruby script in your PATH

modify and copy ashrc-dist to ~/.ashrc

configure OSX Terminal profiles, such as "webserver", "development", etc

run "ash myhostname" and away you go!

v.2 will re-attach to a 'screen' named in your ~/.ashrc

2013-03-14 01:28:01

User: yingkailiang

Functions: ls

-1

Up
Down

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

2013-05-04 17:43:21

User: bbelt16ag

Functions: cut sort uniq

Tags: bash curl delicious xml2 linkchecker

-1

Up
Down

check your up to date delicious links.

This commands queries the delicious api then runs the xml through xml2, grabs the urls cuts out the first two columns, passes through uniq to remove duplicates if any, and then goes into linkchecker who checks the links. the links go the blacklist in ~/.linkchecker/blacklist. please see the manual pages for further info peeps. I took me a few days to figure this one out. I how you enjoy it. Also don't run these api more then once a few seconds you can get banned by delicious see their site for info. ~updated for no recursive

find . -name "*.php" -exec grep -il searchphrase {} \;

2010-01-16 05:09:30

User: unixmonkey7797

Functions: find grep

-1

Up
Down

Find all files containing a word

This is very similar to the first example except that it employs the 'exec' argument of the find command rather than piping the result to xargs. The second example is nice and tidy but different *NIXs may not have as capable a grep command.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

du -s * | sort -nr | head

2010-05-13 12:21:22

User: chenge

Functions: du sort

-1

Up
Down

identify big file

first 10 big file

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

ffmpeg -r 12 -i img%03d.jpg -sameq -s hd720 -vcodec libx264 -crf 25 OUTPUT.MP4

2013-05-04 18:46:36

User: brainstorm

-1

Up
Down

Timelapse with ffmpeg (after symlinking pictures as per ffmpeg FAQ)

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

‹ First < 392 393 394 395 396 > Last ›