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 grep

Commands using grep from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using grep - 1,375 results
find /path -name \*.php -user nobody -exec grep -nH whatever {} \;
2009-02-07 20:53:56
User: al3x
Functions: find grep
0
Up
Down
grep selectively

allows to grep very narrow subset of files

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
alias grep 'gnu grep -i --color=auto'
2009-02-07 18:54:56
User: mnikhil
Functions: alias grep
1
Up
Down
Use color grep by default

Alias the grep command to show colored results by default.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
alias nsl 'netstat -f inet | grep -v CLOSE_WAIT | cut -c-6,21-94 | tail +2'
2009-02-07 18:54:12
User: mnikhil
Functions: alias cut grep tail
3
Up
Down
show all programs connected or listening on a network port

Use the aliased command 'nsl'

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find $(pwd) -type f -exec grep -l "$(echo "\r")" {} \;
2009-02-07 18:53:00
User: mnikhil
Functions: find grep
1
Up
Down
finding cr-lf files aka dos files with ^M characters

its useful to run dos2unix command later on them.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
last | awk '{ print $1 }' | sort | uniq -c | grep -v wtmp
2009-02-07 18:42:59
User: mnikhil
Functions: awk grep last sort uniq
0
Up
Down
To get how many users logged in and logged out and how many times ?
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
kill -HUP ` ps -aef | grep -i firefox | sort -k 2 -r | sed 1d | awk ' { print $2 } ' `
2009-02-07 10:10:45
User: vasudevram
Functions: awk grep kill ps sed sort
-2
Up
Down
UNIX one-liner to kill a hanging Firefox process

The description of how the one-liner works is here at my blog:

http://jugad2.blogspot.com/2008/09/unix-one-liner-to-kill-hanging-firefox.html

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
mount | grep : | tr -s ' ' -d 3 | xargs umount -v
2009-02-07 04:56:26
User: rajaseelan
Functions: grep mount tr umount xargs
-2
Up
Down
umount all nfs mounts on machine
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tail -f <filename> | grep -C <# of lines to show above and below> <text>
2009-02-06 17:19:01
User: manalang
Functions: grep tail
4
Up
Down
Live filter a log file using grep and show x# of lines above and below
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cflow file.c | grep ':$' | sed 's/ <.*//'
2009-02-06 16:18:28
User: aoiaoi
Functions: cflow grep sed
1
Up
Down
search user defined function in c language
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
guid(){ lynx -nonumbers -dump http://www.famkruithof.net/uuid/uuidgen | grep "\w\{8\}-" | tr -d ' '; }
2009-02-06 13:26:33
User: root
Functions: grep tr
-2
Up
Down
GUID generator
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed "s/^ABC/+ABC/" <file | sed "s/DEF$/DEF+/" | tr "\n" "~" | tr "+" "\n" | grep "^ABC" | tr "~" "\n"
2009-02-06 11:29:29
User: poboxy
Functions: grep sed tr
2
Up
Down
Gives you what's between first string and second string included.

If the file content is :

-

Blah blah blah

ABC

hello blah blah blah

bloh bloh bloh

DEF

Bah bah bah

-

You'll get:

-

ABC

hello blah blah blah

bloh bloh bloh

DEF

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -exec grep "test" '{}' /dev/null \; -print
2009-02-06 10:49:00
User: rbattu
Functions: find grep
-2
Up
Down
search for the content in a directory
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -r -l xxxxx . | xargs perl -i -pe "s/xxxxx/yyyyy/g"
2009-02-06 08:18:50
User: hassylin
Functions: grep perl xargs
-1
Up
Down
change the all files which contains xxxxx to yyyyyy

This script first find all files which contains word xxxxx recursively. Then replace the word xxxxx to yyyyy of the files.

Use case:

- Web site domain change

- Function name change of the program

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find DIR -name "FILE" -exec grep -IHn STRING {} \;
2009-02-06 02:59:53
User: yanbe
Functions: find grep
0
Up
Down
Show all occurences of STRING with filename and line number for given FILE pattern under the DIR.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
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
ps aux | awk '{ print $8 " " $2 " " $11}' | grep -w Z
2009-02-06 02:38:20
User: liupeng
Functions: awk grep ps
1
Up
Down
find out zombie process
8~osstat, $2~pid, $11~cmd
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cleartool co -nc `cleartool ls -recurse | grep "hijacked" | sed s/\@\@.*// | xargs`
2009-02-06 00:03:51
User: ultrahax
Functions: grep ls sed
-1
Up
Down
Check out hijacked files in clearcase
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cvs -Q status | grep -i locally
2009-02-05 21:19:25
User: scw
Functions: cvs grep
1
Up
Down
List only locally modified files with CVS
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find $PWD -exec rpm --query -f {} \; | sort -u | grep -v "not owned"
2009-02-05 19:33:43
User: wwest4
Functions: find grep rpm sort
0
Up
Down
List RPM packages installed in current tree

shows all RPMs with files in the current directory & its subdirectories.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
netstat -ant | awk '{print $NF}' | grep -v '[a-z]' | sort | uniq -c
2009-02-05 18:02:59
User: himynameisthor
Functions: awk grep netstat sort uniq
24
Up
Down
List the number and type of active network connections
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
egrep -ie "<*HREF=(.*?)>" index.html | awk -F\" '{print $2}' | grep ://
2009-02-05 17:51:14
User: wwest4
Functions: awk egrep grep
-1
Up
Down
Extract raw URLs from a file
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in `ps aux | grep httpd | awk '{print $2}'`; do lsof -n -p $i | grep ESTABLISHED; done;
2009-02-05 17:50:52
User: Shadow
Functions: awk grep
6
Up
Down
Display any tcp connections to apache

Sometimes apache will get stuck in an established state where you can't get a list of the connecting IP's from mod_status... not a good thing when you need to ban an abusive ip.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn st | grep "^\?" | awk "{print \$2}" | xargs svn add $1
2009-02-05 17:28:53
User: mk
Functions: awk grep xargs
8
Up
Down
Add all unversioned files to svn
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for x in `git status | grep deleted | awk '{print $3}'`; do git rm $x; done
2009-02-05 16:32:13
User: codeprimate
Functions: awk grep rm
0
Up
Down
Using Git, stage all manually deleted files.
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -ef | grep APP | awk '/grep/!{print$2}' | xargs -i kill {}
2009-02-05 16:10:05
User: hooobs
Functions: awk grep kill ps xargs
-2
Up
Down
find and kill a pid for APP

Probably posted previously, I use this all the time to find and kill a process for "APP". Simply replace "APP" with the name of the process you're looking to kill.

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate