Commands using head (314)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. 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.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

Create a listing of all possible permissions and their octal representation.

Convert PDF to JPG
(relies on 'imagemagick') This command will convert all .pdf files in a directory into a 800px (wide or height, whichever is smaller) image (with the aspect ratio kept) .jpg. If the file is named 'example1.pdf' it will be named 'example1.jpg' when it is complete. This is a VERY worthwhile command! People pay hundreds of dollars for this in the Windows world. My .jpg files average between 150kB to 300kB, but your's may differ.

Deleting / Ignoring lines from the top of a file

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Watch a movie in linux without the X windows system.

Read and write to TCP or UDP sockets with common bash tools
Ever needed to test firewalls but didn't have netcat, telnet or even FTP? Enter /dev/tcp, your new best friend. /dev/tcp/(hostname)/(port) is a bash builtin that bash can use to open connections to TCP and UDP ports. This one-liner opens a connection on a port to a server and lets you read and write to it from the terminal. How it works: First, exec sets up a redirect for /dev/tcp/$server/$port to file descriptor 5. Then, as per some excellent feedback from @flatcap, we launch a redirect from file descriptor 5 to STDOUT and send that to the background (which is what causes the PID to be printed when the commands are run), and then redirect STDIN to file descriptor 5 with the second cat. Finally, when the second cat dies (the connection is closed), we clean up the file descriptor with 'exec 5>&-'. It can be used to test FTP, HTTP, NTP, or can connect to netcat listening on a port (makes for a simple chat client!) Replace /tcp/ with /udp/ to use UDP instead.

Query an NFS host for its list of exports

translate what is in the clipboard in english and write it to the terminal

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

stringContains: Determining if a String Contains a Substring


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: