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

Use curl with a local SOCKS5 proxy (e.g. Tor)
Routes curl input through a local SOCKS5 proxy; in this case, anonymizes curl activity via The Onion Router (Tor) proxy running locally. Note that the traffic will be anonymized, but it will NOT be encrypted, so your traffic will be very vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Print lines in a text file with numbers in first column higher or equal than a value
A text file contains thousands of numbers. This command prints lines were the number is greater or equal than a specified value (134000000).

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

Run a command as root, with a delay
$ sleep 1h ; sudo command or $ sudo sleep 1h ; sudo command won't work, because by the time the delay is up, sudo will want your password again.

Split a large file, without wasting disk space
It's common to want to split up large files and the usual method is to use split(1). If you have a 10GiB file, you'll need 10GiB of free space. Then the OS has to read 10GiB and write 10GiB (usually on the same filesystem). This takes AGES. . The command uses a set of loop block devices to create fake chunks, but without making any changes to the file. This means the file splitting is nearly instantaneous. The example creates a 1GiB file, then splits it into 16 x 64MiB chunks (/dev/loop0 .. loop15). . Note: This isn't a drop-in replacement for using split. The results are block devices. tar and zip won't do what you expect when given block devices. . These commands will work: $ hexdump /dev/loop4 . $ gzip -9 < /dev/loop6 > part6.gz . $ cat /dev/loop10 > /media/usb/part10.bin

Display 16 largest installed RPMs in size order, largest first
Interesting to see which packages are larger than the kernel package. Useful to understand which RPMs might be candidates to remove if drive space is restricted.

Download a file and uncompress it while it downloads
This will uncompress the file while it's being downloaded which makes it much faster

add all files not under version control to repository
With the force options the same results can be achieved

View and review the system process tree.
The "pstree" command uses special line-drawing characters. However, when piped into the "less" pager, these are normally disabled.

Find all files of a type and copy them elsewhere while keeping intact their full directory structure using find and cpio
.flac is the filetype. /Volumes/Music/FLAC is the destination.


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: