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

Blacklist usb storage
Some times you may ban usb to protect thefting of your personal data. Blacklist the usb_storage module by adding blacklist usb_storage to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. To load the module manually, $sudo modprobe usb_storage.

Compare / diff two images
Outputs the number of different pixels. 2 params to increase tolerance: * thumbnails size * fuzz, the color distance tolerance See http://en.positon.org/post/Compare-/-diff-between-two-images for more details.

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

Duplicate installed packages from one machine to the other (RPM-based systems)

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Join a folder full of split files
If you use newsgroups then you'll have come across split files before. Joining together a whole batch of them can be a pain so this will do the whole folder in one.

Open a file explorer on a split screen inside your vim session
Open a CLI file explorer by splitting up your screen inside your vim session. Besides, you probably are never going to forget this one.

Speed up builds and scripts, remove duplicate entries in $PATH. Users scripts are oftern bad: PATH=/apath:$PATH type of thing cause diplicate.
Thanks to the authors of: $ awk '!x[$0]++' and the author of: $ joinargs() { (local IFS="$1"; shift && echo "$*") } and others, we can have a fast Linux or android. IMPORTANT if you find a priority order problem in PATH you can push a path directory to the front without duplication as follows: $ PATH=/bin:$PATH then ... Check duplication with: $ echo $PATH|tr : '\n'|sort|uniq -d Finally do a very neat line by line list of $PATH: $ echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'} The speed up is very noticeable for android, and builds on Linux Ubantu are much faster with make and scripts. I will update the command on request. Timothy from SONY

Single use vnc-over-ssh connection
This command 1. SSH into a machine 2. Tunnels VNC port to your local computer ("-L 5900:localhost:5900") 3. Runs a single use vnc server ("x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once -display :0") 4. Goes into the background ("-f") 5. Runs VNC viewer on the local computer connecting to the remote machine via the newly created SSH tunnel ("vinagre localhost:5900")

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials


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: