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

Automatically find and re-attach to a detached screen session
man screen: "-D -R Attach here and now. In detail this means: If a session is running, then reattach. If necessary detach and logout remotely first. If it was not running create it and notify the user. This is the author?s favorite."

Backup a remote database to your local filesystem
I have this on a daily cronjob to backup the commandlinefu.com database from NearlyFreeSpeech.net (awesome hosts by the way) to my local drive. Note that (on my Ubuntu system at least) you need to escape the % signs on the crontab.

ssh batch jobs: query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command
Need to query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command ? Of course you'll have setup keys on all your remote HOSTs. But in the case a key is not present this command will skip that node, proceeding on to the next. -t: Force pseudo-tty allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine. Also prevents unwanted stty messages being sent to console -q: Quiet mode. -o "BatchMode yes" If set to yes, passphrase/password querying will be disabled. This option is useful in scripts and other batch jobs where no user is present

Encrypt every file in the current directory with 256-bit AES, retaining the original.
The password is stored in the password file, which obviously must be kept secure, encrypted later with gpg, deleted, or whatever you prefer. To decrypt: $ openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -salt -in filename.enc -out filename -pass file:/path/to/password-file Alternative ciphers can be used, of course.

Hiding password while reading it from keyboard
Allow to read password in a script without showing the password inserted by the user

lotto generator

Cropping a video file in ffmpeg

List all symbolic links in current directory
why go through the hard way? use find with -type l

Check your unread Gmail from the command line
Checks the Gmail ATOM feed for your account, parses it and outputs a list of unread messages. For some reason sed gets stuck on OS X, so here's a Perl version for the Mac: $ curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '' '{for (i=2; i

Coping files, excluding certain files
Preserve file structure when coping and exclude some file o dir patterns


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: