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

Resume scp of a big file

Convert A USB Cable Into A Smart Home Gadget
An old USB A/B cable is all you need to make your own Smart Home hardware! Cut off and discard the B-portion of the USB cable. On the A side, connect the RED (+) and WHITE (D-) wires via a 1 kiloohm resistor. $Picture: http://imgur.com/dJGVlAU Now plug the cable into a USB port on your Linux computer. Your hardware is ready! Run the above command after changing variable mysms to your personal email-to-SMS gateway info as required by your cellular service provider. The command uses the amazing usbmon tool (see link below) to detect the cable. For the curious, to view the raw usbmon output, run this command: (Also see the sample output) $usbmon -i usb0 How does it work? When the red and white wires are connected (via the 1 kiloohm resistor) the USB hardwere is tricked into thinking that a new USB device is trying to start up. We then use the usbmon utility to capture the host USB events as it tries to talk to the cable. The expect utility watches the usbmon stream and waits for the disconnect text "-2:128" before sending the SMS message. Finally, the sendmail tool is used to email the SMS message to your smartphone via your cellular provider's SMS-to-email gateway. As a result, when the electrical connection between the red and white wire is interrupted, or the USB cable is unplugged from your computer, you get an SMS notification of the disconnect event on your smartphone. Could this be the cheapest smart home gadget ever? What are YOU going to sense with it? Please let me know in the comments and please don't forget to click it up! $ $Links: $ http://www.linuxcertif.com/man/8/usbmon/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Pinouts http://imgur.com/dJGVlAU

ssh -A user@somehost
the -A argument forwards your ssh private keys to the host you're going to. Useful in some scenarios where you have to hop to one server, and then login to another using a private key.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

find previously entered commands (requires configuring .inputrc)
[Click the "show sample output" link to see how to use this keystroke.]   Meta-p is one of my all time most used and most loved features of working at the command line. It's also one that surprisingly few people know about. To use it with bash (actually in any readline application), you'll need to add a couple lines to your .inputrc then have bash reread the .inputrc using the bind command:   $ echo '"\en": history-search-forward' >> ~/.inputrc   $ echo '"\ep": history-search-backward' >> ~/.inputrc   $ bind -f ~/.inputrc     I first learned about this feature in tcsh. When I switched over to bash about fifteen years ago, I had assumed I'd prefer ^R to search in reverse. Intuitively ^R seemed better since you could search for an argument instead of a command. I think that, like using a microkernel for the Hurd, it sounded so obviously right fifteen years ago, but that was only because the older way had benefits we hadn't known about.     I think many of you who use the command line as much as I do know that we can just be thinking about what results we want and our fingers will start typing the commands needed. I assume it's some sort of parallel processing going on with the linguistic part of the brain. Unfortunately, that parallelism doesn't seem to work (at least for me) with searching the history. I realize I can save myself typing using the history shortly after my fingers have already started "speaking". But, when I hit ^R in Bash, everything I've already typed gets ignored and I have to stop and think again about what I was doing. It's a small bump in the road but it can be annoying, especially for long-time command line users. Usually M-p is exactly what I need to save myself time and trouble.     If you use the command line a lot, please give Meta-p a try. You may be surprised how it frees your brain to process more smoothly in parallel. (Or maybe it won't. Post here and let me know either way. ☺)

Generat a Random MAC address
Just increase the 1 at the end if you want to generate more than one. (Alternative to "| head -n N" you could use the -b flag of od: -b $[6*N]

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Remount an already-mounted filesystem without unmounting it
Necessary for fsck for example. The remount functionality follows the standard way how the mount command works with options from fstab. It means the mount command doesn't read fstab (or mtab) only when a device and dir are fully specified. After this call all old mount options are replaced and arbitrary stuff from fstab is ignored, except the loop= option which is internally generated and maintained by the mount command. It does not change device or mount point.

remove empty lines in place with backup
Modify file in place to remove empty lines and create a backup of the original with the extension .bak

Project your desktop using xrandr
HDMI-1 is the interface in the example, which can be obtained just by typing xrandr and surfing through the output. There are a hell lot of configurations that can be done but I prefer auto because it works in most cases. $ Lifesaver


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: