All commands (14,187)

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

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

github push-ing behind draconian proxies!
If you are behind a restrictive proxy/firewall that blocks port 22 connections but allows SSL on 443 (like most do) then you can still push changes to your github repository. Your .ssh/config file should contain: Host * ForwardX11 no TCPKeepAlive yes ProtocolKeepAlives 30 ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/proxytunnel -v -p -d %h:443 Host User git Hostname ssh.github.com ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa IdentitiesOnly yes Basically proxytunnel "tunnels" your ssh connection through port 443. You could also use corkscrew or some other tunneling program that is available in your distro's repository. PS: I generally use "github.com" as the SSH-HOST so that urls of the kind git@github.com:USER/REPO.git work transparently :) You

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

List 10 largest directories in current directory
du -m option to not go across mounts (you usually want to run that command to find what to destroy in that partition) -a option to also list . files -k to display in kilobytes sort -n to sort in numerical order, biggest files last tail -10 to only display biggest 10

Show used disk space:

Determine the version of a specific package with RPM
In this case, I'm getting the package version for 'redhat-release', but of course, this can be applied to any package installed on the filesystem. This is very handy in scripts that need to determine just the version of the package, without the package name and all the sed and grep hackery to get to the data you want. To find out all the support format strings that 'rpm --qf' supports: $ rpm --querytags

Create an eicar.com test virus
Test whether real-time virus detection is working by running this command and checking for eicar.com in /tmp. Requires real-time scanning to be enabled and active on the /tmp directory. If scanning is active, the file should be quarantined/deleted (depending on your settings) moments after running this command. If not, the (harmless) test file should remain in your /tmp directory.

Display the human-readable sizes of all files and folders in the current directory with 3 decimal places
To sort the list by file/directory size, insert `sort -n |` before `awk`.

Calculating series with awk: add numbers from 1 to 100
"seq 100" outputs 1,2,..,100, separated by newlines. awk adds them up and displays the sum. "seq 1 2 11" outputs 1,3,..,11. Variations: 1+3+...+(2n-1) = n^2 $ seq 1 2 19 | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum}' # displays 100 1/2 + 1/4 + ... = 1 $ seq 10 | awk '{sum+=1/(2**$1)} END {print sum}' # displays 0.999023

Print out your hard drive to a jet-direct compatible printer.
Where 192.168.1.2 is a printer with jet-direct. No, I don't suggest this as a backup method.


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: