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

Determine an image's dimensions
Simple use of ImageMagick identify function.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Backup all databases in a MySQL container

Output Windows services in a neatly formated list (cygwin)
Outputs Windows Services service name and display name using "sc query", pipes the output to "awk" for processing, then "column" for formatting. List All Services: $ sc query state= all | awk '/SERVICE_NAME/{printf"%s:",$2;getline;gsub(/DISP.*:\ /,"");printf"%s\n",$0}' | column -ts\: List Started Services: $sc query | awk '/SERVICE_NAME/{printf"%s:",$2;getline;gsub(/DISP.*:\ /,"");printf"%s\n",$0}' | column -ts\: List Stopped Services: $sc query state= inactive| awk '/SERVICE_NAME/{printf"%s:",$2;getline;gsub(/DISP.*:\ /,"");printf"%s\n",$0}' | column -ts\:

Find the package that installed a command

Find the package that installed a command

trace the system calls made by a process (and its children)
strace can be invaluable in trying to figure out what the heck some misbehaving program is doing. There are number of useful flags to limit and control its output, and to attach to already running programs. (See also 'ltrace'.)

Execute a sudo command remotely, without displaying the password
The ssh command alone will execute the sudo command remotely, but the password will be visible in the terminal as you type it. The two stty commands disable the terminal from echoing the password back to you, which makes the remote sudo act as it does locally.

Combines an arbitrary number of transparent png files into one file
This one liner; combines all sequentially numbered files; in this example IMG_0001.png to IMG_1121.png by generating the shell script, making the shell script executable and then running the shell script to combine the 1121 png into a single png file named _final.png tested on Mac OS X 10.6.3 with ImageMagick 6.5.8-0 2009-11-22 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org

Resets your MAC to a random MAC address to make you harder to find.
Next time you are leaching off of someone else's wifi use this command before you start your bittorrent ...for legitimate files only of course. It creates a hexidecimal string using md5sum from the first few lines of /dev/urandom and splices it into the proper MAC address format. Then it changes your MAC and resets your wireless (wlan0:0).


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: