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.

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.

UpGuard checks and validates configurations for every major OS, network device, and cloud provider.
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

May 19, 2015 - A Look At The New Commandlinefu
I've put together a short writeup on what kind of newness you can expect from the next iteration of clfu. Check it out here.
March 2, 2015 - New Management
I'm Jon, I'll be maintaining and improving clfu. Thanks to David for building such a great resource!
Hide

Top Tags


awk, bash, curl, find, grep, Linux, sed
Hide

Functions

Commands using grep from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using grep - 1,662 results
echo "DISK:";df -Pl | grep -v "Filesystem" | awk '{print $5,$6}' ; echo "MEM:" ; free -mto | awk '{ print $1,$2,$3,$4 }'; echo "CPU:"; top -b -d1 -n1 | grep Cpu | awk '{print $2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9}';echo "LOAD:"; cat /proc/loadavg
2014-09-29 12:43:52
User: injez
Functions: awk cat df echo free grep top
Tags: cpu usage memory usage disk usage monitoring load average
0
Up
Down
Resource Monitoring

Monitoring system in one line :

DISK : disk space

MEM: memory ( mem , swap, Total)

CPU : all information about cpu activity

LOAD : load average

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for line in `docker ps | awk '{print $1}' | grep -v CONTAINER`; do docker ps | grep $line | awk '{printf $NF" "}' && echo $(( `cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/docker/$line*/memory.usage_in_bytes` / 1024 / 1024 ))MB ; done
2014-09-24 04:37:01
User: sammcj
Functions: awk echo grep ps
Tags: memory lxc docker container
3
Up
Down
Show memory usage of all docker / lxc containers
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=merged.pdf -dBATCH `ls | grep foo`
2014-09-19 16:00:32
User: Arasithil
Functions: grep gs
-1
Up
Down
Merge only certain pdfs in a directory
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
docker images | grep '' | awk '{print $3}' | xargs docker rmi
2014-09-19 15:24:12
User: j0hnb
Functions: awk grep xargs
Tags: docker
0
Up
Down
Docker - delete unused images
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
docker ps -a | grep 'Exit' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker rm
2014-09-19 15:23:42
User: j0hnb
Functions: awk grep ps xargs
Tags: docker
0
Up
Down
Docker - delete all non-running container
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -efL | grep <Process Name>
2014-09-11 16:35:31
User: tsener
Functions: grep ps
-1
Up
Down
ps to show child thread PIDs
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for I in *.CR2; do if [ `exiv2 pr -p a -u $I | grep 'xmp.Rating' | awk '{ print $4 }'` == "1" ]; then echo $I; fi; done
2014-09-10 03:31:44
User: jbuchbinder
Functions: awk echo grep pr
Tags: Image processing image canon cr2 raw rating
0
Up
Down
List Canon CR2 raw files which have been in-camera rated (5Dmk3+)
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
( eval $(grep -z '^DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS' /proc/$(pgrep -u $USER plasma-overlay)/environ); export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS; kquitapp plasma-overlay )
2014-09-01 12:49:58
User: mig_hg
Functions: eval export grep
Tags: KDE unlock screensaver
0
Up
Down
Unlock your KDE4 session over SSH

So this first obtains address of the DBUS session, as it's not available by default over SSH. Then it tells plasma-overlay to exit. `kquitapp` is pretty much an equivalent of the qdbus calls.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
netstat -anp | grep ":<port>"
2014-08-22 07:01:38
User: erez83
Functions: grep netstat
0
Up
Down
monitor all open connections to specific port
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat /var/log/syslog | grep score= | awk '{print $15}' | more
2014-08-21 21:40:17
User: unix1776
Functions: awk cat grep
0
Up
Down
search system log for spamassassin score and list only 15th column
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tail -1f /var/opt/fds/logs/TraceEventLogFile.txt.0 | grep <msisdn> | tee <test-case-id>.trace | tr '|' '\n'
2014-08-21 19:29:07
User: neomefistox
Functions: grep tail tee tr
Tags: #Specialized #Ericsson #CS5.2 #Integration
0
Up
Down
This is a specialized command for Ericsson CS5.2 - Getting the test case trace on SDP

This command allows to follow up a trace on SDP (CS5.2), at the same time as the trace records are stored in the file with "raw" format.

Trace files in native format are useful to filter the records before to translation from '|' to '\n'.

Example:

grep -v OP_GET <raw-records>.trace | tr '|' '\n'
Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep Failed auth.log | rev | cut -d\ -f4 | rev | sort -u
2014-08-14 14:57:41
User: supradave
Functions: cut grep rev sort
0
Up
Down
Grep auth log and print ip of attackers

Find the failed lines, reverse the output because I only see 3 indicators after the IP address, i.e. port, port#, ssh2 (in my file), cut to the 4th field (yes, you could awk '{print $4}'), reverse the output back to normal and then sort -u (for uniq, or sort | uniq).

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -la | grep ^l
2014-08-11 03:06:48
User: gatopan
Functions: grep ls
Tags: ls bsd GNU coreutils symbolic link
1
Up
Down
List all symbolic links in current directory

Tested with GNU and BSD ls.

Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tail -f LOG_FILE | grep --line-buffered SEARCH_STR | cut -d " " -f 7-
2014-08-07 10:40:45
User: pjsb
Functions: cut grep tail
Tags: grep cut tail -f
0
Up
Down
Tail -f: truncate and search

Outputs / monitors the content of the LOG_FILE , which matches the SEARCH_STR. The output is cutted by spaces (as delimiter) starting from column 7 till the end.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
yum list installed| awk '{print $1}'| grep -e "x86" -e "noarch" | grep -v -e '^@'| sort
2014-08-06 23:13:24
User: serverwholesale
Functions: awk grep
0
Up
Down
List all Centos intalled packages

Great for moves, re-installs etc since it is not version specific yet is architecture specific.

Centos yum list is well know for wrapping lines .

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
netstat -tn 2>/dev/null | grep :80 | awk '{print $5}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head
2014-08-01 07:28:57
User: djzander
Functions: awk cut grep netstat sort uniq
1
Up
Down
list ips with high number of connections
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
watch -n5 ss \| grep -c WAIT
2014-07-30 17:09:08
User: djpohly
Functions: grep watch
Tags: tcp ss iproute2
0
Up
Down
Show a running count of CLOSE_WAIT and TIME_WAIT connections for debugging network apps

Uses the suggestions by jld on #12421 as well as the new iproute2 tools instead of old net-tools.

Comments (69) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ifconfig eth0 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2 }'
2014-07-23 20:43:15
User: smorg
Functions: awk grep ifconfig
Tags: centos
0
Up
Down
List Server IP address

I just use this to see my ip on the server I'm working on

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -r "<script" | grep -v src | awk -F: '{print $1}' | uniq
2014-07-23 06:24:31
User: sucotronic
Functions: awk grep
Tags: PHP javascript
2
Up
Down
Search files with js declarations inside

Useful to crawl where the javascript is declared, and extract it a common file. You can redirect it to a file to review item by item.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
postqueue -p | grep -A 1 "over quota" | grep @ | sort | uniq | tr --delete ' '
2014-07-14 08:23:43
User: rmontagud
Functions: grep sort tr uniq
Tags: Postfix
0
Up
Down
Postfix: Mailboxes over quota in queue
Comments (6) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -name "*.php" -exec php -l {} \; | grep found
2014-07-11 14:17:34
User: azizsaleh
Functions: find grep
0
Up
Down
scan folder to check syntax error in php files

Same but will only returns the invalid file (great when emailing the list to the team).

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tail -f *.log | grep --color=always '|==>.+<=='
2014-07-11 07:47:27
User: danimath
Functions: grep tail
Tags: grep tail -f
0
Up
Down
show filenames in tail output with color

This shows the the filenames of tail output in color. Helpful if you have many log files to tail

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . |xargs grep '<html\|<body\|<table' |sed '/~/d;s/:.*//' |sed 's/.*/mv & &.html/' |uniq >run.sh; sh run.sh
2014-07-09 19:20:40
User: mobluse
Functions: find grep sed sh uniq xargs
0
Up
Down
Append html-extension to all files in a directory structure that contains html-code.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
git log --name-status --oneline --all | grep -P "^[A|M|D]\s" | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq
2014-07-09 14:13:24
User: cakyus
Functions: awk grep sort
Tags: git
2
Up
Down
List all files ever added in git repository
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -n "arrname\[[[:digit:]]\+\]" filename
2014-07-09 08:02:01
User: sleepy_11
Functions: grep
0
Up
Down
grep an array item, like a_var[11], in a file

Just want to show the "+" usage in the grep command. And if using egrep, thing would be a little bit easier:

grep -n "arrname\[[[:digit:]]+\]" filename

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