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 using cut from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using cut - 476 results
for x in `find /vmfs/volumes/ -name *vmx -exec grep -H linux.iso {} \; |cut -d : -f 1`; do echo $x; grep -i sync $x; done;
2009-10-30 16:19:16
User: uid0
Functions: cut echo grep sync
0
Up
Down
Search vmware vmx files if Linux guests are set to sync time to host

besure to adjust your find to use to correct location of your VMX files.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
teste.txt < cut -d : -f 1,5 /etc/passwd | tr : \\t | tr a-z A-Z | cat teste.txt
2009-10-20 14:53:38
User: osvaldofilho
Functions: cat cut tr
-12
Up
Down
List system's users
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in $(netstat --inet -n|grep ESTA|awk '{print $5}'|cut -d: -f1);do geoiplookup $i;done
2009-10-18 20:41:47
User: servermanaged
Functions: awk cut grep netstat
3
Up
Down
Localize provenance of current established connections

Sample command to obtain a list of geographic localization for established connections, extracted from netstat. Need geoiplookup command ( part of geoip package under CentOS)

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ord () { seq 1 127 | while read i; do echo `chr $i` $i; done | grep "^$1 " | cut -c '3-' }
2009-10-16 21:54:01
User: infinull
Functions: cut echo grep read seq
0
Up
Down
Get decimal ascii code from character

uses the previous "chr" function and uses it to create the inverse function "ord" by brute force.

It's slow, It's inelegant, but it works.

I thought I needed ord/chr to do a cartesian cipher in shell script a whie ago, but eventualy I realized I could get fancy with tr and do the same thing...

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo $RANDOM$RANDOM$RANDOM |cut -c3-12
2009-10-13 08:08:45
User: emmerich164
Functions: cut echo
Tags: sed HEAD od
0
Up
Down
Outputs a 10-digit random number
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
dpkg --get-selections | cut -f1 | while read pkg; do dpkg -L $pkg | xargs -I'{}' bash -c 'if [ ! -d "{}" ]; then echo "{}"; fi' | tr '\n' '\000' | du -c --files0-from - | tail -1 | sed "s/total/$pkg/"; done
2009-10-12 14:57:54
User: pykler
Functions: bash cut du echo read sed tail tr xargs
Tags: Debian wajig
4
Up
Down
List your largest installed packages.

Calculates the size on disk for each package installed on the filesystem (or removed but not purged). This is missing the

| sort -rn

which would put the biggest packges on top. That was purposely left out as the command is slightly on the slow side

Also you may need to run this as root as some files can only be checked by du if you can read them ;)

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
b="http://2010.utosc.com"; for p in $( curl -s $b/presentation/schedule/ | grep /presentation/[0-9]*/ | cut -d"\"" -f2 ); do f=$(curl -s $b$p | grep "/static/slides/" | cut -d"\"" -f4); if [ -n "$f" ]; then echo $b$f; curl -O $b$f; fi done
2009-10-11 17:28:46
User: danlangford
Functions: cut echo grep
Tags: curl cut for UTOSC
2
Up
Down
download all the presentations from UTOSC2010

miss a class at UTOSC2010? need a refresher? use this to curl down all the presentations from the UTOSC website. (http://2010.utosc.com) NOTE/WARNING this will dump them in the current directory and there are around 37 and some are big - tested on OSX10.6.1

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -printf "%h\n" | cut -d/ -f-2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
2009-10-09 23:49:53
User: ivancho
Functions: cut find sort uniq
Tags: file count
6
Up
Down
Count the total number of files in each immediate subdirectory

counts the total (recursive) number of files in the immediate (depth 1) subdirectories as well as the current one and displays them sorted.

Fixed, as per ashawley's comment

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find ~/Music -daystart -mtime -60 -name *mp3 -printf "%T@\t%p\n" | sort -f -r | head -n 30 | cut -f 2
2009-10-06 17:57:04
User: iadbungler
Functions: cut find head sort
1
Up
Down
Print a list of the 30 last modified mp3s sorted by last first
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sitepass() { echo -n "$@" | md5sum | sha1sum | sha224sum | sha256sum | sha384sum | sha512sum | gzip - | strings -n 1 | tr -d "[:space:]" | tr -s '[:print:]' | tr '!-~' 'P-~!-O' | rev | cut -b 2-11; history -d $(($HISTCMD-1)); }
2009-10-01 20:14:57
User: syssyphus
Functions: cut echo gzip md5sum rev sha1sum strings tr
Tags: Security
14
Up
Down
generate a unique and secure password for every website that you login to

usage: sitepass MaStErPaSsWoRd example.com

description: An admittedly excessive amount of hashing, but this will give you a pretty secure password, It also eliminates repeated characters and deletes itself from your command history.

tr '!-~' 'P-~!-O' # this bit is rot47, kinda like rot13 but more nerdy

rev # this avoids the first few bytes of gzip payload, and the magic bytes.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ssh-keygen -R `host hostname | cut -d " " -f 4`
2009-09-23 14:58:28
User: flart
Functions: cut hostname ssh ssh-keygen
5
Up
Down
Remove invalid key from the known_hosts file for the IP address of a host

Quick shortcut if you know the hostname and want to save yourself one step for looking up the IP address separately.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cut -f 2- -d " "
2009-09-23 13:12:15
User: edo
Functions: cut
2
Up
Down
print all except first collumn
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
lsof -P -i -n | cut -f 1 -d " "| uniq | tail -n +2
2009-09-19 21:23:54
User: edo
Functions: cut tail uniq
Tags: bash grep lsof internet
30
Up
Down
Show apps that use internet connection at the moment.

show only the name of the apps that are using internet

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
file /System/Library/Extensions/*.kext/Contents/MacOS/* |grep -i x86_64 |nl | tail -1 | cut -f1 -f3; file /System/Library/Extensions/*.kext/Contents/MacOS/* |grep -i "mach-o object i386" |nl | tail -1 | cut -f1 -f3
2009-09-11 16:43:27
User: digitalshadow
Functions: cut file grep nl tail
-2
Up
Down
How far is Mac OS X 10.6 from 64-bit?

Not as far off as you thought, now is it?

-mac fanboy

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
function nowrap { export COLS=`tput cols` ; cut -c-$COLS ; unset COLS ; }
2009-09-11 15:07:00
User: mobidyc
Functions: cut export unset
Tags: bash ksh
4
Up
Down
no more line wrapping in your terminal

works on all unices.

Show sample output | Comments (6) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -oE "ssid=\".*\"" /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf | cut -c6- | sed s/\"//g | zenity --list --title="Choose Access Point" --column="SSID"
2009-09-05 10:41:05
User: unixmonkey5449
Functions: cut grep sed
1
Up
Down
Makes a Zenity select list based on entries in your wpa_supplicant.conf

If you still connect to your wireless access point manually and need to use wpa_supplicant, the above fu will grep all of the known SSID from your wpa_supplicant.conf file, present it in a Zenity list and return the SSID name you choose. I've wrapped this command in to a bash script that then up's the interface, associates and autenticates. Saves me from using NetworkManager ;)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
du -a --max-depth=1 | sort -n | cut -d/ -f2 | sed '$d' | while read i; do if [ -f $i ]; then du -h "$i"; else echo "$(du -h --max-depth=0 "$i")/"; fi; done
2009-09-03 20:43:43
User: nickwe
Functions: cut du echo read sed sort
Tags: bash sort sed echo du read while cut
3
Up
Down
Ultimate current directory usage command

Based on the MrMerry one, just add some visuals to differentiate files and directories

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d|xargs du -a --max-depth=0|sort -rn|cut -d/ -f2|sed '1d'|while read i;do echo "$(du -h --max-depth=0 "$i")/";done;find . -maxdepth 1 -type f|xargs du -a|sort -rn|cut -d/ -f2|sed '$d'|while read i;do du -h "$i";done
2009-09-03 20:33:21
User: nickwe
Functions: cut du echo find read sed sort xargs
Tags: bash sort sed echo find xargs read while cut
2
Up
Down
Ultimate current directory usage command

Based on the MrMerry one, just add some visuals and sort directory and files

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
file /System/Library/Extensions/*.kext/Contents/MacOS/* |grep -i x86_64 |nl |tail -1 |cut -f1 -f3 && file /System/Library/Extensions/*.kext/Contents/MacOS/* |grep -v x86_64 |nl |tail -1 |cut -f1 -f3
2009-09-03 14:28:02
User: commandlinefu
Functions: cut file grep nl tail
-1
Up
Down
How far is Mac OS X 10.6 from 64-bit?

Next time you see a mac fanboy bragging about 64-bitness of 10.6 give him this so he might sh?

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
free -b | grep "Swap:" | sed 's/ * / /g' | cut -d ' ' -f2
2009-09-02 07:16:34
User: opexxx
Functions: cut free grep sed
0
Up
Down
free swap

free swap

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cut -f N- file.dat
2009-08-31 23:08:18
User: sklm
Functions: cut
2
Up
Down
Print all fields in a file/output from field N to the end of the line
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls *.c | while read F; do gcc -Wall -o `echo $F | cut -d . -f 1 - ` $F; done
2009-08-28 13:01:56
User: pichinep
Functions: cut gcc ls read
-7
Up
Down
Compile all C files in a directory

Compile *.c files with "gcc -Wall" in actual directory, using as output file the file name without extension.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo aptitude unmarkauto $(apt-cache depends some-deb-meta-package-name | grep Depends | cut -d: -f2)
2009-08-26 12:56:33
User: yra
Functions: cut grep sudo
2
Up
Down
Debian: Mark all dependent packages as manualy installed.

Debian: Mark all dependent packages as manually installed. So they are not automatically removed if you remove some meta package - like gnome-desktop-environment for example.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
mount -t ntfs-3g -o ro,loop,uid=user,gid=group,umask=0007,fmask=0117,offset=0x$(hd -n 1000000 image.vdi | grep "eb 52 90 4e 54 46 53" | cut -c 1-8) image.vdi /mnt/vdi-ntfs
2009-08-23 17:25:07
User: Cowboy
Functions: cut grep mount
15
Up
Down
Mount the first NTFS partition inside a VDI file (VirtualBox Disk Image)

Found at: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=52

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in `grep "unable to stat" /var/log/syslog | cut -d "/" -f 3 | sort | uniq`; do find /var/qmail/queue -name $i -type f -exec rm -v {} \; ; done
2009-08-21 22:03:39
User: foob4r
Functions: cut find rm sort
Tags: qmail
0
Up
Down
purge old stale messages on a qmail queue
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate