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 - 478 results
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
for kern in $(grep "initrd " /boot/grub/grub.conf|grep -v ^#|cut -f 2- -d-|sed -e 's/\.img//g'); do mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-$kern.img $kern; done
2009-08-19 09:53:29
User: oernii2
Functions: cut grep sed
-1
Up
Down
Recreate all initrd files

Do this with caution.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo du -ks $(ls -d */) | sort -nr | cut -f2 | xargs -d '\n' du -sh 2> /dev/null
2009-08-17 22:21:09
User: Code_Bleu
Functions: cut du ls sort sudo xargs
Tags: disk usage
7
Up
Down
Get the size of all the directories in current directory (Sorted Human Readable)

This allows the output to be sorted from largest to smallest in human readable format.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -printf '%20s %p\n' | sort -n | cut -b22- | tr '\n' '\000' | xargs -0 ls -laSr
2009-08-13 13:13:33
User: fsilveira
Functions: cut find ls sort tr xargs
Tags: sort find ls
10
Up
Down
find the biggest files recursively, no matter how many

This command will find the biggest files recursively under a certain directory, no matter if they are too many. If you try the regular commands ("find -type f -exec ls -laSr {} +" or "find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -laSr") the sorting won't be correct because of command line arguments limit.

This command won't use command line arguments to sort the files and will display the sorted list correctly.

Show sample output | Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
nmap -n -iR 0 -sL | cut -d" " -f 2
2009-08-12 16:49:55
User: kovan
Functions: cut
1
Up
Down
Generate random IP addresses

It never ends

Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
host $HOSTNAME|cut -d' ' -f4
2009-08-08 12:39:00
User: penpen
Functions: cut host
1
Up
Down
Get your external IP address if your machine has a DNS entry

Using DynDNS or a similar service not only allows access to your home machine from outside without needing to know what IP the ISP has assigned to it but it also comes in handy if you want to know your external IP address. The only purpose of the sed command is to remove the leading "host.na.me has address " part from the output. If you don't need to discard it you can simply use

host $HOSTNAME
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ips(){ for if in ${1:-$(ip link list|grep '^.: '|cut -d\ -f2|cut -d: -f1)};do cur=$(ifconfig $if|grep "inet addr"|sed 's/.*inet addr:\([0-9\.]*\).*/\1/g');printf '%-5s%-15s%-15s\n' $if $cur $(nc -s $cur sine.cluenet.org 128 2>/dev/null||echo $cur);done;}
2009-08-07 10:04:46
User: frozenfire
Functions: cut echo grep ifconfig link sed
Tags: Linux IP ip address
-3
Up
Down
Get internal and external IP addresses

Gets the internal and external IP addresses of all your interfaces, or the ones given as arguments

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
dd if=/dev/urandom count=200 bs=1 2>/dev/null | tr "\n" " " | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9]//g' | cut -c-16
2009-08-07 06:32:55
User: amaymon
Functions: cut dd sed tr
Tags: dd sed cut tr
0
Up
Down
Generate Random Passwords
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
html2text http://checkip.dyndns.org | grep -i 'Current IP Address:'|cut -d' ' -f4
2009-08-06 11:30:32
User: adonis28850
Functions: cut grep
-2
Up
Down
Get your external IP address

The same as the other user, but smarter, using -d and -f

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
html2text http://checkip.dyndns.org | grep -i 'Current IP Address:'|cut -c21-36
2009-08-06 10:29:02
User: tkoopa
Functions: cut grep
-1
Up
Down
Get your external IP address
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -Eho '<[a-ZA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_-:]*' * | sort -u | cut -c2-
2009-08-05 21:54:29
User: inkel
Functions: cut grep sort
Tags: sort grep cut xml
0
Up
Down
Lists unambigously names of all xml elements used in files in current directory

This one will work a little better, the regular expressions it is not 100% accurate for XML parsing but it will suffice any XML valid document for sure.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find -type f -exec md5sum '{}' ';' | sort | uniq --all-repeated=separate -w 33 | cut -c 35-
2009-08-04 07:05:12
User: infinull
Functions: cut find md5sum sort uniq
18
Up
Down
Find Duplicate Files (based on MD5 hash)

Calculates md5 sum of files. sort (required for uniq to work). uniq based on only the hash. use cut ro remove the hash from the result.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
copy(){ cp -v "$1" "$2"&watch -n 1 'du -h "$1" "$2";printf "%s%%\n" $(echo `du -h "$2"|cut -dG -f1`/0.`du -h "$1"|cut -dG -f1`|bc)';}
2009-08-03 14:32:32
User: frozenfire
Functions: cp cut echo
Tags: copy copy progress progress
-3
Up
Down
Copy with progress
Comments (6) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo $( du -sm /var/log/* | cut -f 1 ) | sed 's/ /+/g'
2009-07-31 21:42:53
User: flux
Functions: cut du echo sed
Tags: echo bc
2
Up
Down
cooking a list of numbers for calculation

When you've got a list of numbers each on its row, the ECHO command puts them on a simple line, separated by space. You can then substitute the spaces with an operator. Finally, pipe it to the BC program.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80 | head -n5 | tail -1 | cut -f2 -d-
2009-07-31 06:49:52
User: beerbrain
Functions: cut echo head tail
Tags: sed tail futurama cut nc
-4
Up
Down
Get Futurama quotations from slashdot.org servers
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall | cut -f 1
2009-07-29 14:37:36
User: odoepner
Functions: cut grep
1
Up
Down
List all installed Debian packages

Should work on all systems that use dpkg and APT package management.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for file in *.001; do NAME=`echo $file | cut -d. -f1,2`; cat "$NAME."[0-9][0-9][0-9] > "$NAME"; done
2009-07-29 10:04:26
User: jaymzcd
Functions: cat cut file
2
Up
Down
Join a folder full of split files

If you use newsgroups then you'll have come across split files before. Joining together a whole batch of them can be a pain so this will do the whole folder in one.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ifconfig | grep "inet [[:alpha:]]\+" | cut -d: -f2 | cut -d' ' -f2
2009-07-24 13:16:37
User: feraf
Functions: cut grep ifconfig
Tags: Linux ifconfig
-6
Up
Down
Get all IPs via ifconfig

Get the IP address of all your network cards.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ifconfig | grep "inet addr" | cut -d: -f2 | cut -d' ' -f1
2009-07-24 09:39:19
User: trungtm
Functions: cut grep ifconfig
Tags: Linux ifconfig
-2
Up
Down
Get all IPs via ifconfig
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
/sbin/ifconfig | grep inet | cut -f 2 -d ":" | cut -f 1 -d " " |egrep -v "^$"
2009-07-22 07:27:54
User: giray
Functions: cut egrep grep
-1
Up
Down
Read just the IP address of a device

to clean up the extra lines

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
/sbin/ifconfig | grep inet | cut -f 2 -d ":" | cut -f 1 -d " "
2009-07-21 21:42:04
User: random_bob
Functions: cut grep
-1
Up
Down
Read just the IP address of a device

another way to output the IP address' of the system

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find / | xargs ls -l | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 1,3,4,9
2009-07-21 08:41:59
User: pavanlimo
Functions: cut find ls tr xargs
-2
Up
Down
Command for getting the list of files with perms, owners, groups info. Useful to find the checksum of 2 machines/images.
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -rc logged_in app/ | cut -d : -f 2 | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum}'
2009-07-15 14:16:44
User: terceiro
Functions: awk cut grep
Tags: awk grep cut arithmetic
-2
Up
Down
count how many times a string appears in a (source code) tree

grep's -c outputs how may matches there are for a given file as "file:N", cut takes the N's and awk does the sum.

Show sample output | Comments (6) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
dpkg -S `which nm` | cut -d':' -f1 | (read PACKAGE; echo "[${PACKAGE}]"; dpkg -s "${PACKAGE}"; dpkg -L "${PACKAGE}") | less
2009-07-14 20:21:48
User: mohan43u
Functions: cut echo read
Tags: which dpkg
2
Up
Down
A command's package details

In Debian based distros, this command will list 'binutils' package details which contains 'nm' command. You can replace 'nm' to any other command.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate