All commands (14,211)

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

Lets Tux say the random fact. [add it to .bashrc to see it in new terminal window]

Gathering all MAC's in your local network
replace eth0 with your ethernet or wireless network interface.

sends a postscript file to a postscript printer using netcat

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

Remove invalid key from the known_hosts file for the IP address of a host
Quick shortcut if you know the hostname and want to save yourself one step for looking up the IP address separately.

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

Migrate existing Ext3 filesystems to Ext4
Before doing this, back-up all data on any ext3 partitions that are to be converted to ext4. After running previous command you MUST run fsck, is needed to return the filesystem to a consistent state. $ fsck -pDf /dev/yourpartition Edit /etc/fstab and change the 'type' from ext3 to ext4 for any partitions that are converted to ext4.

Search shoutcast web radio by keyword
Searches for web radio by submitted keyword and returns the station name and the link for listing . May be enhanced to read user's selection and submit it to mplayer.

Backup all mysql databases to individual files on a remote server
It grabs all the database names granted for the $MYSQLUSER and gzip them to a remote host via SSH.

Wait for file to stop changing
Here's a way to wait for a file (a download, a logfile, etc) to stop changing, then do something. As written it will just return to the prompt, but you could add a "; echo DONE" or whatever at the end. This just compares the full output of "ls" every 10 seconds, and keeps going as long as that output has changed since the last interval. If the file is being appended to, the size will change, and if it's being modified without growing, the timestamp from the "--full-time" option will have changed. The output of just "ls -l" isn't sufficient since by default it doesn't show seconds, just minutes. Waiting for a file to stop changing is not a very elegant or reliable way to measure that some process is finished - if you know the process ID there are much better ways. This method will also give a false positive if the changes to the target file are delayed longer than the sleep interval for any reason (network timeouts, etc). But sometimes the process that is writing the file doesn't exit, rather it continues on doing something else, so this approach can be useful if you understand its limitations.


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: