Commands using echo (1,545)

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

Grab IP address on machine with multiple interfaces
Instead of hard-coding in a check to scrape info from ifconfig based on a specific interface, do it in a more portable way. This works really well if you switch between wired, wireless, bluetooth or even VPN connections. You can get your current IP in a script (since it'll be something like tun0 instead of eth0 or wlan1). This uses a well known public ip address 8.8.8.8, but it doesn't actually connect to it, it just shows you the route it would take.

Mount a partition from within a complete disk dump
Suppose you made a backup of your hard disk with dd: dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/disk/backup.img This command enables you to mount a partition from inside this image, so you can access your files directly. Substitute PARTITION=1 with the number of the partition you want to mount (returned from sfdisk -d yourfile.img).

How To Get the Apache Document Root
Grabs the Apache config file (yielded from httpd) and returns the path specified as DocumentRoot.

Lists all clients of a Squid proxy
Generates the list of clients (IPs addresses) that have used the Squid webproxy according to the most recent log. Every IP appears only once in the list.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Find Mac address

Compare copies of a file with md5
I had the problem that the Md5 Sum of a file changed after copying it to my external disk. This unhandy command helped me to fix the problem.

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

Get max number of arguments
Get max number of arguments that can be accepted by the exec() system call.


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: