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 tr

Commands using tr from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using tr - 249 results
pwd | tr -d '\n' | xsel -b
2011-11-25 15:02:10
User: ajkaanbal
Functions: pwd tr
0
Up
Down
Copy current/working directory to clipboard

ctrl+v to see the result.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c 32
2011-11-20 17:29:45
User: noqqe
Functions: cat head tr
8
Up
Down
Generate a random password 30 characters long
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tr -d '\\' | tr -d '\n'
2011-10-13 17:40:02
User: tongrider
Functions: tr
0
Up
Down
Join lines split with backslash at the end
Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat table-mv.txt | perl -pe 's{([^;]+);([^;]+)}{tbl$1/tbl$2}' | perl -pe 's{(\S+)}{perl -i -pe #s/$1/g# xxx.sql}' | tr "#" "\'" | bash
2011-10-05 15:55:34
User: hute37
Functions: cat perl tr
0
Up
Down
Multiple Perl Search/Replace from a file

with a semicolon text file map, apply multiple replace to a single file

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps ewwo command PID | tr ' ' '\n' | grep \=
2011-09-15 12:07:46
User: axii
Functions: command grep ps tr
Tags: tr bsd ps environment ipso
1
Up
Down
Given process ID print its environment variables

Same as previous but compatible with BSD/IPSO

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat /proc/PID/environ | tr '\0' '\n'
2011-09-15 11:23:35
User: axii
Functions: cat tr
1
Up
Down
Given process ID print its environment variables

Same as previous but without fugly sed =x

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo 'fOo BaR' | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | sed 's/\(^\| \)\([a-z]\)/\1\u\2/g'
2011-09-09 21:40:31
User: caiosba
Functions: echo sed tr
Tags: sed tr capitalize
4
Up
Down
Capitalize first letter of each word in a string

Capitalize first letter of each word in a string.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tr -d "\r" < file.vcf | tr "\0" " " > file.vcf.txt
2011-09-09 19:21:44
User: totti
Functions: tr
Tags: text convert vcard
0
Up
Down
Convert phone book VCARD to text
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tr -d "\r" < dos.txt > linux.txt
2011-09-09 18:53:34
User: totti
Functions: tr
Tags: Linux windows text conversion
0
Up
Down
Convert windows text file to linux text document
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn st -q | cut -c 2- | tr -d ' ' | xargs tar -czvf ../backup.tgz
2011-08-31 10:30:29
User: titus
Functions: cut tar tr xargs
0
Up
Down
archive all files containing local changes (svn)

This works more reliable for me ("cut -c 8-" had one more space, so it did not work)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat dirtyfile.txt | awk '{gsub(/[[:punct:]]/,"")}1' | tr A-Z a-z | sed 's/[0-9]*//g' | sed -e 's/ //g' | strings | tr -cs '[:alpha:]' '\ ' | sed -e 's/ /\n/g' | tr A-Z a-z | sort -u > cleanfile.txt
2011-08-28 01:26:04
User: purehate
Functions: awk cat sed sort strings tr
0
Up
Down
Clean a wordlist for use with password cracking tools and rules

Using large wordlists is cumbersome. Using password cracking programs with rules such as Hashcat or John the ripper is much more effective. In order to do this many times we need to "clean" a wordlist removing all numbers, special characters, spaces, whitespace and other garbage. This command will covert a entire wordlist to all lowercase with no garbage.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
function expand_url() { curl -sI $1 | grep Location: | cut -d " " -f 2 | tr -d "\n" | pbcopy }
2011-08-21 05:30:09
User: gt
Functions: cut grep tr
Tags: bash grep curl cut osx tr pbcopy
0
Up
Down
OSX Expand URL and Copy to Clipboard

Expand a URL, aka do a head request, and get the URL. Copy this value to clipboard.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sort -R /usr/share/dict/british | grep -v -m4 ^\{1,10\}$ | tr [:upper:] [:lower:] | tr "\n" " " | tr -d "'s" | xargs -0 echo
2011-08-16 10:11:21
User: takac
Functions: grep sort tr xargs
Tags: tr xkcd
-1
Up
Down
Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password

Doesn't use shuf, its much faster with "shuf -n4" instead of sort -R

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
RANGE=`wc -l /usr/share/dict/words | sed 's/^\([0-9]*\) .*$/\1/'`; for i in {1..4}; do let "N = $RANDOM % $RANGE"; sed -n -e "${N}p" /usr/share/dict/words | tr -d '\n'; done; RANGE=100; let "N = $RANDOM % $RANGE"; echo $N
2011-08-16 07:04:57
User: unixmonkey24597
Functions: echo sed tr
Tags: bash xkcd
-1
Up
Down
creates a xkcd #936-style password
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
jot 4 | awk '{ print "wc -l /usr/share/dict/words | awk '"'"'{ print \"echo $[ $RANDOM * $RANDOM % \" $1 \"]\" }'"'"' | bash | awk '"'"'{ print \"sed -n \" $1 \"p /usr/share/dict/words\" }'"'"' | bash" }' | bash | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/$/\n/'
2011-08-16 00:26:56
User: fathwad
Functions: awk bash sed tr
Tags: tr xkcd
0
Up
Down
Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password

So I use OSX and don't have the shuf command. This is what I could come up with.

This command assumes /usr/share/dict/words does not surpass 137,817,948 lines and line selection is NOT uniformly random.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -P ^[a-z].* | grep -v "'s$" | grep -Pv ^.\{1,15\}$ | shuf -n4 | tr '\n' ' ' | sed 's/$/\n/'
2011-08-15 01:03:48
User: bugmenot
Functions: cat grep sed tr
Tags: tr xkcd shuf
-2
Up
Down
Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password

The first grep rejects capitalised words since the dict has proper nouns in it that you mightn't want to use. The second grep rejects words with ending in apostrophe s, and the third forces the words to be at least 15 characters long.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn st | grep '^?' | sed -e 's/\?[[:space:]]*//' | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 svn add
2011-08-13 05:39:41
User: tekiomo
Functions: grep sed tr xargs
Tags: svn
0
Up
Down
add all files not under version control to repository
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
IFS=?" ; for i in * ; do mv -v $i `echo $i|tr ???????????????????\ aaaeeiooAAAEEIOOOcC_` ; done
2011-08-11 04:20:55
User: valessiobrito
Functions: mv tr
Tags: mv rename tr accents
-2
Up
Down
Removing accents in name files
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
shuf -n4 /usr/share/dict/words | tr -d '\n'
2011-08-10 13:04:39
User: Strawp
Functions: tr
Tags: tr xkcd shuf
19
Up
Down
Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password

4 random words are better than one obfuscated word

http://xkcd.com/936/

Show sample output | Comments (9) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
pi 62999 | tr 0-9 del\ l\!owrH
2011-07-29 22:47:53
User: maurol
Functions: tr
Tags: bash pi
0
Up
Down
Hello world

Pi also says hello world!

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find src/ -name "*.java" | while read f; do echo -n "$f "; cat "$f" | tr -dc '{}'; echo; done | awk '{ print length($2), $1 }' | sort -n
2011-07-21 01:25:31
User: mindsocket
Functions: awk cat echo find read sort tr
Tags: Programming java analysis complexity
0
Up
Down
Find .java files with high complexity (counting curly braces)
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn log | tr -d '\n' | sed -E 's/-{2,}/\'$'\n/g' | sed -E 's/ \([^\)]+\)//g' | sed -E 's/^r//' | sed -E "s/[0-9]+ lines?//g" | sort -g
2011-07-15 00:00:03
User: gdevarajan
Functions: sed sort tr
0
Up
Down
SVN Status log to CSV (Mac OSX friendly)

This is a minor variation to cowboy's submission - his script worked great on Ubuntu, but the sed gave issues on osx (which used BSD). Minor tweaks (sed -E instead of sed -r and \'$'\n to handle the new line made it work.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -E '<DT><A|<DT><H3' bookmarks.html | sed 's/<DT>//' | sed '/Bookmarks bar/d' | sed 's/ ADD_DATE=\".*\"//g' | sed 's/^[ \t]*//' | tr '<A HREF' '<a href'
2011-05-26 22:21:01
User: chrismccoy
Functions: grep sed tr
Tags: sed grep chrome
-1
Up
Down
convert chrome html export to folders, links and descriptions

chrome only lets you export in html format, with a lot of table junk, this command will just export the titles of the links and the links without all that extra junk

Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in {21..79};do echo -e "\x$i";done | tr " " "\n" | shuf | tr -d "\n"
2011-04-14 01:43:40
User: hunterm
Functions: echo tr
Tags: echo password tr for shuf for loop generator alpha symbols digit
-4
Up
Down
Random Password Generator (uses all chars, no repeated chars)

Generates a password using symbols, alpha, and digits. No repeating chars.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
apt-cache search pidgin* | awk '{print$ 1}' | tr '\n' ' ' | xargs aptitude -y install
2011-04-13 08:01:22
User: insaneisnotfree
Functions: apt awk tr xargs
0
Up
Down
Install evertything with the prefix pidgin or wathever

Command to install everything on a debian based system with the prefix you indicate.

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