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.

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

Commands using grep

Commands using grep from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using grep - 1,375 results
ip a s eth0 | grep "inet " | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -f1 -d'/'
2012-07-16 07:54:43
User: thelan
Functions: awk cut grep head
Tags: IP
-4

Get the first IPv4 address of an interface

ifconfig | grep "inet" | tail -1 | awk '{print $2}'
ifconfig | grep "inet" | grep "broadcast" | awk '{print $2}'
ifconfig | grep "inet addr" | cut -d":" -f2 | cut -d" " -f1
git log --summary 223286b.. | grep 'Author:' | wc -l
smbclient -N -gL \\SambaServer 2>&1 | grep -e "Disk|" | cut -d'|' -f2
ps auxww | grep application | grep processtobekilled | gawk '{print $2}' | grep -v grep | xargs kill -9
2012-07-03 20:37:56
User: j0sh10
Functions: gawk grep kill ps xargs
0

You can also use gawk:

ps auxww | gawk '/application/' | gawk '/processtobekilled/' | gawk '{print $2}' | grep -v grep | xargs kill -9

cal | grep -E --color "\b`date +%e`\b|$"
2012-06-27 20:30:40
User: donjuanica
Functions: cal grep
Tags: calendar
0

The cal command is handy, but sometimes you want to quickly see today's date highlighted. That's why I came up with this quick command.

Much like http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1342/show-this-months-calendar-with-todays-date-highlighted but cleaner and more succinct.

grep -E "[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}"
for i in G M K; do du -hx /var/ | grep [0-9]$i | sort -nr -k 1; done | less
2012-06-26 22:57:17
User: jlaunay
Functions: du grep sort
Tags: du
1

This command give a human readable result without messing up the sorting.

grep -c "^$" filename
2012-06-26 17:43:17
User: ankush108
Functions: grep
Tags: grep count empty
0

This pattern matches empty lines in the file and -c gives the count

netstat -tn | grep :80 | awk '{print $5}'| grep -v ':80' | cut -f1 -d: |cut -f1,2,3 -d. | sort | uniq -c| sort -n
2012-06-26 08:29:37
User: krishnan
Functions: awk cut grep netstat sort uniq
0

cut -f1,2 - IP range 16

cut -f1,2,3 - IP range 24

cut -f1,2,3,4 - IP range 24

find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l "foo"
svn status | grep "^M" | while read entry; do file=`echo $entry | awk '{print $2}'`; echo $file; svn revert $file; done
2012-06-17 16:01:06
User: wsams
Functions: awk echo grep read
0

This command allows you to revert every modified file one-by-one in a while loop, but also after "echo $file;" you can do any sort of processing you might want to add before the revert happens.

curl -s kernel.org | grep '<strong>' | head -3 | tail -1 | cut -d'>' -f3 | cut -d'<' -f1
find . \( -name "*cpp" -o -name "*hpp" \) -exec grep -Hn -E "043[eE]|70[Dd]7" \{\} \;
grep -r -Z -l "<text>" . | xargs -0 echo rm
2012-06-14 08:09:46
User: limonte
Functions: echo grep xargs
Tags: grep
4

-r recursively

-Z zero byte after each file name instead of the usual newline

-l only filenames

ls -ltr |grep 'May 12'|awk '{print $9;}'|xargs rm -v
ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' -e 's/^/ /' -e 's/-/|/'
mysqlbinlog <logfiles> | grep exec | grep end_log_pos | cut -d' ' -f2- | cut -d: -f-2 | uniq -c
2012-05-30 09:42:21
User: theist
Functions: cut exec grep uniq
1

shows number of mysql bin log events (which are mysql server events) per minute, useful to check stress times postmortem

mysqlbinlog <logfiles> | grep exec | grep end_log_pos | grep -v exec_time=0 | sed 's/^\(.*exec_time=\([0-9]\+\).*\)/\2 - \1 /' | sort -n
2012-05-30 09:38:02
User: theist
Functions: exec grep sed sort
0

Shows sorted by query time, the headers of mysqlbinlog entries. Then is easy to locate the heavier events on the raw log dump

du -cah /path/to/folder/ | grep total
for foo in <list of directories>; do while find $foo -type d -empty 2>/dev/null| grep -q "."; do find $foo -type d -empty -print0 | xargs -0 rmdir; done; done
2012-05-23 08:09:16
Functions: find grep xargs
0

This will check if there are any empty directories, or newly emptied directories, in a list of directories. It will then delete all of those directories. It works with gnu find and OSX/BSD find.

ls -al | grep ^d
2012-05-21 17:39:23
User: christo
Functions: grep ls
0

Cleaner than adding -p to ls ( eg ls -alp ), this will tell ls to only output directories in the file listing, whilst maintaining all the usual other column elements of the ls output.

members () { dscl . -list /Users | while read user; do printf "$user "; dsmemberutil checkmembership -U "$user" -G "$*"; done | grep "is a member" | cut -d " " -f 1; };
2012-05-20 11:34:33
User: eduo
Functions: cut grep printf read
-1

Group membership in OS X is a mish-mash of standards that end up meaning there's almost a half-dozen of ways to belong to a group, what with group inheritance and automatic assignment. This means there's no easy command to find out all groups a user belongs to. The only sensible way then is to list all users and then query each user for membership.

NOTE: This is a function. Once input you can execute it by calling with a groupname.