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
or
Sign in Register

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:

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

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

All commands

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 10,564 results
find ~/Desktop/ \( -regex '.*/\..*' \) -print -exec rm -Rf {} \;
2009-06-02 19:45:06
User: unixmonkey4063
Functions: find rm
Tags: hidden find
-6
Up
Down
Search for all files that begin with . and delete them.
Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
watch -n 1 uptime\;myqladmin --user=<user> --password=<password> --verbose processlist
2009-03-21 18:29:28
User: root
Functions: watch
Tags: mysql
-6
Up
Down
Monitor server load as well as running MySQL processes

Useful for monitoring both MySQL and the server load at the same time.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -ef | grep [j]boss | awk '{print $2}'|xargs kill -9
2010-09-30 15:55:41
User: utoxin
Functions: awk grep kill ps xargs
Tags: kill
-6
Up
Down
Kill any process with one command using program name

Removed unneeded grep -v by making the initial grep unable to match itself.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find Documents\ and\ Settings -iregex .+\.doc -or -iregex .+\.xls > office.lst
2010-11-04 17:58:52
User: yababay
Functions: find
-6
Up
Down
Find only *.doc and *xls files on Windows partition

This command is useful for archiving or extracting Documents and Settings folder, when working in Linux box with Windows partition (dual boot installation). You have to enter into appropriate directory, of course.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
pwgen -Bs 10 1
2013-05-16 10:50:00
User: techie
Tags: Security password sha256 /dev/urandom md5deep
-6
Up
Down
Create a secure password using /dev/urandom and sha256
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -l | grep ^l
2009-04-02 17:47:36
User: haivu
Functions: grep ls
Tags: ls
-6
Up
Down
Show All Symbolic (Soft) Links

Shows all linked file and destinations. The 'ls -l' command lists the files in long (1 file per line) format, and the grep command displays only those lines that starts with an l (lower case L) -- a linked file.

Updated: Remove reference to hard links because this command does not apply to hard link as others kindly pointed out.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
declare -i i=0 ; for file in * ; do i=$[$i+1] ; mv "$file" $i; done
2010-08-26 12:40:58
User: pepin
Functions: file mv
Tags: rename numerate
-6
Up
Down
Numerate files, rename files in a directory by incremental number
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed 's/$//'
2009-02-16 21:04:37
User: grep
Functions: sed
-6
Up
Down
convert DOS newlines to unix newlines
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat x
2011-09-15 11:53:47
User: umahp44
Functions: cat
Tags: cat file number
-6
Up
Down
Show line numbers in a text file
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sedit() { cp "$*"{,.bk}; which $EDITOR > /dev/null && $EDITOR "$*" || vim "$*"; }
2011-08-16 18:28:22
User: kaedenn
Functions: cp vim which
-6
Up
Down
Backup a file before editing it.

Some people put spaces in filenames. Others have an $EDITOR environment variable set. This defaults to vim, but you can use whatever you wish: emacs, nano, ed, butterflies, etc.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for a in $(seq 5 8); do cat twit.txt | cut -d " " -f$a | grep "^@" | sort -u; done > followlst.txt
2013-03-29 21:07:09
User: xmuda
Functions: cat cut grep seq sort
-6
Up
Down
Get fresh FollowBack list for Twitter

Go to "https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%23TeamFollowBack&src=hash" and then copy al the text on the page. If you scroll down the page will be bigger. Then put al the text in a text file called twit.txt

If you follow the user there is a high probability the users give you follow back.

To follow all the users you can use an iMacros script.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat /etc/*issue
2009-05-07 20:53:03
User: lv4tech
Functions: cat
-6
Up
Down
Find out which version of linux you are running
Comments (6) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
FAIL2BAN=`ps ax | grep fail2ban | grep -v grep | awk {'print $1'}` && if [ -n "$FAIL2BAN" ]; then printf "\n[INFO] Fail2Ban is running and the PID is %s\n\n" $FAIL2BAN; else printf "\n [INFO] Fail2Ban is not running\n\n"; fi
2009-02-11 04:36:49
User: fmdlc
Functions: awk grep printf
-6
Up
Down
Check if Fail2Ban is Running

Check if Fail2Ban is running on the system and alert it with a message in the terminal

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
pv file1 > file2
2010-02-25 19:18:32
User: ppaschka
Tags: pv copy progress progress
-6
Up
Down
Copy with progress

Only works on single files, doesn't preserve permissions/timestamps/ownership.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
(crontab -e) 00 12 * * * apt-get update (/etc/init.d/cron restart)
2009-10-29 12:45:26
User: osvaldofilho
Functions: crontab
-6
Up
Down
Update your system every day at the lunch time (12:00)
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
alias lh='ls -a | egrep "^\."'
2009-03-05 20:36:58
User: fabs
Functions: alias egrep
Tags: bash hidden ls alias
-6
Up
Down
alias to list hidden files of a folder
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
fdisk -l /dev/sda
2012-06-05 10:17:54
User: netaxiz
Functions: fdisk
-6
Up
Down
See size of partitions
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
rd /S /Q directory
2012-08-07 18:08:36
User: bugmenot
-6
Up
Down
Remove very large or problematic directories under Windows from Command Prompt

When it says "Invalid Directory Name"

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
setenforce 0
2013-04-05 15:38:05
User: techie
Tags: selinux
-6
Up
Down
Turn off SE Linux

This will turn off SE Linux

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -saltS [dirname]
2011-09-18 22:03:11
User: ztank1013
Functions: ls
-6
Up
Down
Salty detailed directory listing...

It lists files and folder under dirname adding at the beginning of each line the file allocated size in blocks (-s). It also sorts output by file size (-S) from bigger to smaller. Actually the -t option in that precise position does not give any effect... (challenge: can you tell me why?) but of course gives to the ls command some salty taste! :)

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
nice -n0 ls | mpg321 -@- &
2011-07-10 11:50:46
User: kev
Functions: ls mpg321 nice
Tags: mpg321
-6
Up
Down
play all songs under current directory smoothly as background job
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
vim txt.gz
2010-09-03 01:54:05
User: Aparicio
Functions: vim
-6
Up
Down
read txt or txt.gz files

Works at lest with .gz .bz2 .tar.gz .tar.bz2

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ssh-keygen -R hostname
2009-07-16 15:41:33
User: jritorto
Functions: ssh ssh-keygen
-6
Up
Down
Cute, but we already had this figured out when the Linux kids were still slurping down log-sized spliffs in the back of the microbus.

put down the joint and rtfm :)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
alias install='sudo apt-get install'
2011-10-27 19:53:01
User: haivu
Functions: alias
Tags: Ubuntu alias
-6
Up
Down
Shorthand to install package in Ubuntu

I put this line in my ~/.bashrc file (which I source via ~/.bash_profile). Now, when I need to install a package, I typed *install* instead of the longer version.

Comments (9) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
lwp-dump http://www.boredomsoft.org/ip.php|grep Client
2010-10-09 06:19:14
User: Andrew
Functions: grep
-6
Up
Down
Get My Public IP Address
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate