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).

Commands by totti

Commands by totti from sorted by
Terminal - Commands by totti - 80 results
manswitch() { man $1 | grep -A5 "^ *\-$2"; }
2011-08-19 08:36:54
User: totti
Functions: grep man
Tags: man grep switch
1
Up
Down
What is the use of this switch ?

Find the usage of a switch with out searching through the entire man page.

Usage: manswitch [cmd] [switch]

Eg:

manswitch grep silent

____________________________

In simple words

man <cmd> | grep "\-<switch>"

Eg:

man grep | grep "\-o"

This is not a standard method but works.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | sort -nk 6
2011-08-16 11:04:45
User: totti
Functions: ps sort
Tags: sort ps
2
Up
Down
Sort output by column

(separator = $IFS)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate" http://example.org
2011-08-16 10:32:01
User: totti
Tags: curl gzip
6
Up
Down
Check if your webserver supports gzip compression with curl
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
watch -n 2 -d '/sbin/ifconfig eth0'
2011-08-16 10:29:34
User: totti
Functions: watch
Tags: Network ifconfig watch
5
Up
Down
Highlight network TX, RX information change
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
VBoxBlockBoot() { sudo umount "$2"*; sudo chmod 777 "$2"; VBoxManage storageattach "$1" --medium ~/.rawHD4VB_`basename "$2"`.vmdk --type hdd --storagectl "IDE Controller" --device 0 --port 0 ; VBoxManage startvm "$1";}
2011-07-29 13:04:19
User: totti
Functions: chmod sudo umount
Tags: boot root virtualbox usb VBoxManage
0
Up
Down
Boot from a block device without giving root privilege to Virtual Box

Usage: VBoxBlockBoot [Virtual_Machine] [Block_device]

Eg: VBoxBlockBoot WinXP /dev/sdc

In another words

vm=usb; usb=sdc;sudo umount /dev/$usb* ; sudo chmod 777 /dev/$usb ; VBoxManage storageattach $vm --medium ~/raw-HD-4-VB/$usb.vmdk --type hdd --storagectl "IDE Controller" --device 0 --port 0 ; VBoxManage startvm $vm

Where

vm --> Name of the virtual machine to start

usb --> Block device to use. (/dev/sdc)

This can used after setup up a boot loader on to my USB pen drive or HDD (After creating Live USB). Here root privilege is needed but not granted to Virtual Box. Thus we can access all our VM.( If we run VBox as root we can't access our VMs). Root privilege is used to

- Unmount the storage device

- Chmod to full access (777)

Requirements:-

1. Device information file (rawvmdk file) created by the following command. Need to run only once. Not bad to run many.

VBoxCreateRawDisk() { VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ~/.rawHD4VB_`basename "$1"`.vmdk -rawdisk "$1"; }

2. Root privilege to umount & chmod

3. Real storage medium (ie /dev/*) (Non-virtual such as USB HD, pen drive, a partition)

4. A virtual m/c already available (here "usb")

vm=usb; usb=sdc;sudo umount /dev/$usb* ; sudo chmod 777 /dev/$usb ; VBoxManage storageattach $vm --medium ~/raw-HD-4-VB/$usb.vmdk --type hdd --storagectl "IDE Controller" --device 0 --port 0 ; VBoxManage startvm $vm

VBoxBlockBoot() { sudo umount "$2"*; sudo chmod 777 "$2"; VBoxManage storageattach "$1" --medium ~/.rawHD4VB_`basename "$2"`.vmdk --type hdd --storagectl "IDE Controller" --device 0 --port 0 ; VBoxManage startvm "$1"; }

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