All commands (14,182)

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

archlinux:Delete packages from pacman cache that are older than 7 days
Sometimes my /var/cache/pacman/pkg directory gets quite big in size. If that happens I run this command to remove old package files. Packages that we're upgraded in last N days are kept in case you are forced to downgrade a specific package. The command is obviously Arch Linux related.

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Take screenshot through SSH
When connected to a box via ssh you can do a quick screenshot of that box using this command. After that you can rscp it over to your box and look at it.

Parallel file downloading with wget
xargs can be used in this manner to download multiple files at a time, and xargs will in this case run 10 processes at a time and initiate a new one when the number running falls below 10.

Recursively execute command on directories (.svn, permissions, etc)
The above command will set the GID bit on all directories named .svn in the current directory recursively. This makes the group ownership of all .svn folders be the group ownership for all files created in that folder, no matter the user. This is useful for me as the subversion working directory on my server is also the live website and needs to be auto committed to subversion every so often via cron as well as worked on by multiple users. Setting the GID bit on the .svn folders makes sure we don't have a mix of .svn metadata created by a slew of different users.

Get the Volume labels all bitlocker volumes had before being encrypted
Get information of volume labels of bitlocker volumes, even if they are encrypted and locked (no access to filesystem, no password provided). Note that the volume labels can have spaces, but only if you name then before encryption. Renaming a bitlocker partition after being encrypted does not have the same effect as doing it before.

Programmatic way to find and set your timezone

Find the package that installed a command

Find out how old a web page is
I used to use the Firefox "View page info" feature a lot to determine how stale the web page I was looking at was. Now that I use mostly Chrome I miss that feature, so here is a command line alternative using wget. The -S says to display the server response, the --spider says to not download any files/pages, just fetch the header. The output goes to stderr, so to grep it you use 2>&1 to combine the stderr stream with stdout, the pipe that to grep for Last-Modified. You can use curl instead if you have it installed, like this: $ curl --head -s http://osswin.sourceforge.net | grep Mod

Startup a VPN connection through command line


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: