Linux

This is a linux command line reference for common operations. Examples marked with are valid/safe to paste without modification into a terminal, so you may want to keep a terminal window open while reading this so you can cut & paste. All these commands have been tested both on Fedora and Ubuntu. See also more linux commands. Command apropos whatis man -t ascii | ps2pdf - > ascii.pdf which command time command time cat dir navigation cd cd (cd dir && command) Go to previous directory Go to $HOME directory Go to dir, execute command and return to current dir Put current dir on stack so you can popd back to it quick dir listing List files by date. See also newest and find_mm_yyyy Print in 9 columns to width of terminal Search 'expr' in this dir and below. See also findrepo Search all regular files for 'example' in Description Show commands pertinent to string. See also threadsafe make a pdf of a manual page Show full path name of command See how long a command takes Start stopwatch. Ctrld to stop. See also sw

pushd . file searching alias l='ls -l --color=auto' ls -lrt ls /usr/bin | pr -T9 -W$COLUMNS find -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -E 'expr' find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -F 'example'

this dir and below Search all regular files for 'example' in find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F 'example' this dir Process each item with multiple find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do echo $dir; echo cmd2; done commands (in while loop) Find files not readable by all find -type f ! -perm -444 (useful for web site) Find dirs not accessible by all find -type d ! -perm -111 (useful for web site) Search cached index for names. This re is locate -r 'file[^/]*\.txt' like glob *file*.txt Quickly search (sorted) dictionary for look reference prefix Highlight occurances of regular expression grep --color reference /usr/share/dict/words in dictionary archives and compression gpg -c file Encrypt file gpg file.gpg Decrypt file Make compressed tar -c dir/ | bzip2 > dir.tar.bz2 archive of dir/ Extract archive (use bzip2 -dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar -x gzip instead of bzip2 for tar.gz files) Make encrypted tar -c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote 'dd of=dir.tar.gz.gpg' archive of dir/ on remote machine Make archive of find dir/ -name '*.txt' | tar -c --files-from=- | bzip2 > dir_txt.tar.bz2 subset of dir/ and below Make copy of subset find dir/ -name '*.txt' | xargs cp -a --target-directory=dir_txt/ --parents of dir/ and below Copy (with ( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) permissions) copy/ dir to /where/to/ dir ( cd /dir/to/copy && tar -c . ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) Copy (with

( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ssh -C user@remote 'cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p'

dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh user@remote 'dd of=sda.gz' rsync (Network efficient file copier: Use the --dry-run option for testing) rsync -P rsync://rsync.server.com/path/to/file file

permissions) contents of copy/ dir to /where/to/ Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to remote:/where/to/ dir Backup harddisk to remote machine Only get diffs. Do multiple times for troublesome downloads Locally copy with rate limit. It's like nice for I/O Mirror web site (using compression and encryption) Synchronize current directory with remote one Run command on $HOST as $USER (default command=shell) Run GUI command on $HOSTNAME as $USER Copy with permissions to $USER's home directory on $HOST Use faster crypto for local LAN. This might saturate GigE Forward connections to $HOSTNAME:8080 out to $HOST:80 Forward connections

rsync --bwlimit=1000 fromfile tofile

rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~/public_html/ remote.com:'~/public_html'

rsync -auz -e ssh remote:/dir/ . && rsync -auz -e ssh . remote:/dir/ ssh (Secure SHell) ssh $USER@$HOST command

ssh -f -Y $USER@$HOSTNAME xeyes

scp -p -r $USER@$HOST: file dir/

scp -c arcfour $USER@$LANHOST: bigfile

ssh -g -L 8080:localhost:80 root@$HOST ssh -R 1434:imap:143 root@$HOST

ssh-copy-id $USER@$HOST wget (multi purpose download tool)

from $HOST:1434 in to imap:143 Install public key for $USER@$HOST for password-less log in

Store local browsable (cd dir/ && wget -nd -pHEKk http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html) version of a page to the current dir Continue downloading a wget -c http://www.example.com/large.file partially downloaded file Download a set of files to the current wget -r -nd -np -l1 -A '*.jpg' http://www.example.com/dir/ directory FTP supports wget ftp://remote/file[1-9].iso/ globbing directly Process output wget -q -O- http://www.pixelbeat.org/timeline.html | grep 'a href' | head directly Download url at echo 'wget url' | at 01:00 1AM to current dir Do a low priority download (limit to wget --limit-rate=20k url 20KB/s in this case) wget -nv --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html Check links in a file Efficiently update a wget --mirror http://www.example.com/ local copy of a site (handy from cron) networking (Note ifconfig, route, mii-tool, nslookup commands are obsolete) Show status of ethtool eth0 ethernet interface eth0 Manually set ethernet ethtool --change eth0 autoneg off speed 100 duplex full interface speed Show status of iwconfig eth1 wireless interface eth1 Manually set wireless iwconfig eth1 rate 1Mb/s fixed interface speed List wireless iwlist scan networks in range

List network interfaces Rename interface ip link set dev eth0 name wan eth0 to wan Bring interface eth0 ip link set dev eth0 up up (or down) List addresses for ip addr show interfaces Add (or del) ip and ip addr add 1.2.3.4/24 brd + dev eth0 mask (255.255.255.0) ip route show List routing table Set default gateway ip route add default via 1.2.3.254 to 1.2.3.254 Lookup DNS ip host pixelbeat.org address for name or vice versa Lookup local ip hostname -i address (equivalent to host `hostname`) Lookup whois info whois pixelbeat.org for hostname or ip address List internet services netstat -tupl on a system List active netstat -tup connections to/from system windows networking (Note samba is the package that provides all this windows specific networking support) Find windows machines. See also smbtree findsmb Find the windows (netbios) name nmblookup -A 1.2.3.4 associated with ip address List shares on windows machine or smbclient -L windows_box samba server Mount a windows mount -t smbfs -o fmask=666,guest //windows_box/share /mnt/share share Send popup to echo 'message' | smbclient -M windows_box windows machine ip link show

(off by default in XP sp2) text manipulation (Note sed uses stdin and stdout. Newer versions support inplace editing with the -i option) Replace string1 with sed 's/string1/string2/g' string2 Modify anystring1 to sed 's/\(.*\)1/\12/g' anystring2 Remove comments sed '/^ *#/d; /^ *$/d' and blank lines Concatenate lines sed ':a; /\\$/N; s/\\\n//; ta' with trailing \ Remove trailing sed 's/[ \t]*$//' spaces from lines Escape shell metacharacters active sed 's/\([`"$\]\)/\\\1/g' within double quotes seq 10 | sed "s/^/ /; s/ *\(.\{7,\}\)/\1/" Right align numbers seq 10 | sed p | paste - Duplicate a column sed -n '1000{p;q}' Print 1000th line sed -n '10,20p;20q' Print lines 10 to 20 Extract title from sed -n 's/.*<title>\(.*\)<\/title>.*/\1/ip;T;q' HTML web page Delete a particular sed -i 42d ~/.ssh/known_hosts line Sort IPV4 ip sort -t. -k1,1n -k2,2n -k3,3n -k4,4n addresses echo 'Test' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' Case conversion Filter non printable tr -dc '[:print:]' < /dev/urandom characters cut fields separated tr -s '[:blank:]' '\t' </proc/diskstats | cut -f4 by blanks history | wc -l Count lines set operations (Note you can export LANG=C for speed. Also these assume no duplicate lines within a file) Union of unsorted sort file1 file2 | uniq files Intersection of sort file1 file2 | uniq -d unsorted files Difference of sort file1 file1 file2 | uniq -u unsorted files

sort file1 file2 | uniq -u join -t'\0' -a1 -a2 file1 file2 join -t'\0' file1 file2 join -t'\0' -v2 file1 file2 join -t'\0' -v1 -v2 file1 file2 math

Symmetric Difference of unsorted files Union of sorted files Intersection of sorted files Difference of sorted files Symmetric Difference of sorted files

Quick math (Calculate ). See also bc Calculate the unix seq -f '4/%g' 1 2 99999 | paste -sd-+ | bc -l way More complex (int) echo 'pad=20; min=64; (100*10^6)/((pad+min)*8)' | bc e.g. This shows max FastE packet rate Python handles echo 'pad=20; min=64; print (100E6)/((pad+min)*8)' | python scientific notation Plot FastE packet rate echo 'pad=20; plot [64:1518] (100*10**6)/((pad+x)*8)' | gnuplot -persist vs packet size Base conversion echo 'obase=16; ibase=10; 64206' | bc (decimal to hexadecimal) Base conversion (hex to dec) ((shell echo $((0x2dec)) arithmetic expansion)) Unit conversion units -t '100m/9.58s' 'miles/hour' (metric to imperial) Unit conversion (SI units -t '500GB' 'GiB' to IEC prefixes) units -t '1 googol' Definition lookup Add a column of numbers. See also seq 100 | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc add and funcpy calendar cal -3 Display a calendar cal 9 1752 Display a calendar for echo '(1 + sqrt(5))/2' | bc -l

 date -d fri [ $(date -d '12:00 +1 day' +%d) = '01' ] || exit date --date='25 Dec' +%A

date --date='@2147483647'

TZ='America/Los_Angeles' date

date --date='TZ="America/Los_Angeles" 09:00 next Fri' locales printf "%'d\n" 1234

a particular month year What date is it this friday. See also day exit a script unless it's the last day of the month What day does xmas fall on, this year Convert seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 UTC) to date What time is it on west coast of US (use tzselect to find TZ) What's the local time for 9AM next Friday on west coast US Print number with thousands grouping appropriate to locale Use locale thousands grouping in ls. See also l Extract info from locale database Lookup locale info for specific country. See also ccodes List fields available in locale database Show available conversions (aliases on each line) Windows "ansi" to local charset (auto does CRLF conversion) Windows utf8 to local charset

BLOCK_SIZE=\'1 ls -l echo "I live in `locale territory`" LANG=en_IE.utf8 locale int_prefix locale -kc $(locale | sed -n 's/\(LC_.\{4,\}\)=.*/\1/p') | less recode (Obsoletes iconv, dos2unix, unix2dos) recode -l | less

recode windows-1252.. file_to_change.txt

recode utf-8/CRLF.. file_to_change.txt

recode iso-8859-15..utf8 file_to_change.txt recode ../b64 < file.txt > file.b64 recode /qp.. < file.qp > file.txt recode ..HTML < file.txt > file.html recode -lf windows-1252 | grep euro echo -n 0x80 | recode latin-9/x1..dump echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..latin-9/x echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..utf-8/x CDs gzip < /dev/cdrom > cdrom.iso.gz mkisofs -V LABEL -r dir | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz mount -o loop cdrom.iso /mnt/dir cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast gzip -dc cdrom.iso.gz | cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom -

Latin9 (western europe) to utf8 Base64 encode Quoted printable decode Text to HTML Lookup table of characters Show what a code represents in latin-9 charmap Show latin-9 encoding Show utf-8 encoding Save copy of data cdrom Create cdrom image from contents of dir Mount the cdrom image at /mnt/dir (read only) Clear a CDRW Burn cdrom image (use dev=ATAPI scanbus to confirm dev) Rip audio tracks from CD to wav files in current dir Make audio CD from all wavs in current dir (see also cdrdao) Make ogg file from wav file Show files by size, biggest last Show top disk users in current dir. See also dutop Sort paths by easy to

cdparanoia -B

cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio -pad *.wav oggenc --tracknum=$track track.cdda.wav -o track.ogg disk space (See also FSlint) ls -lSr du -s * | sort -k1,1rn | head du -hs /home/* | sort -k1,1h

 df -h df -i fdisk -l

rpm -q -a --qf '%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n' | sort -k1,1n

dpkg-query -W -f='${Installed-Size;10}\t${Package}\n' | sort -k1,1n

dd bs=1 seek=2TB if=/dev/null of=ext3.test

> file monitoring/debugging tail -f /var/log/messages strace -c ls >/dev/null strace -f -e open ls >/dev/null strace -f -e trace=write -e write=1,2 ls >/dev/null ltrace -f -e getenv ls >/dev/null lsof -p $$ lsof ~

interpret disk usage Show free space on mounted filesystems Show free inodes on mounted filesystems Show disks partitions sizes and types (run as root) List all packages by installed size (Bytes) on rpm distros List all packages by installed size (KBytes) on deb distros Create a large test file (taking no space). See also truncate truncate data of file or create an empty file Monitor messages in a log file Summarise/profile system calls made by command List system calls made by command Monitor what's written to stdout and stderr List library calls made by command List paths that process id has open List processes that have specified path open Show network traffic except ssh. See also tcpdump_not_me List processes in a

tcpdump not port 22 ps -e -o pid,args --forest

 ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args --sort pcpu | sed '/^ 0.0 /d' ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS ps -C firefox-bin -L -o pid,tid,pcpu,state ps -p 1,$$ -o etime= last reboot free -m watch -n.1 'cat /proc/interrupts' udevadm monitor system information (see also sysinfo) ('#' means root access is required) uname -a

hierarchy List processes by % cpu usage List processes by mem (KB) usage. See also ps_mem.py List all threads for a particular process List elapsed wall time for particular process IDs Show system reboot history Show amount of (remaining) RAM (m displays in MB) Watch changeable data continuously Monitor udev events to help configure rules Show kernel version and system architecture Show name and version of distribution Show all partitions registered on the system Show RAM total seen by the system Show CPU(s) info Show PCI info Show USB info List mounted filesystems on the system (and align output) Show state of cells in laptop battery

head -n1 /etc/issue

cat /proc/partitions grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo lspci -tv lsusb -tv mount | column -t

grep -F capacity: /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info

# dmidecode -q | less

# smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours # hdparm -i /dev/sda # hdparm -tT /dev/sda # badblocks -s /dev/sda interactive (see also linux keyboard shortcuts) readline screen

Display SMBIOS/DMI information How long has this disk (system) been powered on in total Show info about disk sda Do a read speed test on disk sda Test for unreadable blocks on disk sda Line editor used by bash, python, bc, gnuplot, ... Virtual terminals with detach capability, ... Powerful file manager that can browse rpm, tar, ftp, ssh, ... Interactive/scriptable graphing Web browser open a file or url with the registered desktop application

mc

gnuplot links xdg-open .

Command grep . /proc/sys/net/ipv4/* set | grep $USER tr '\0' '\n' < /proc/$$/environ echo $PATH | tr : '\n' kill -0 $$ && echo process exists and can accept signals

Description List the contents of flag files Search current environment Display the startup environment for any process Display the $PATH one per line Check for the existence of a process (pid)

 find /etc -readable | xargs less -K -p'*ntp' -j $((${LINES:-25}/2)) namei -l ~/.ssh Low impact admin # apt-get install "package" -o Acquire::http::Dl-Limit=42 \ -o Acquire::Queue-mode=access echo 'wget url' | at 01:00 # apache2ctl configtest && apache2ctl graceful nice openssl speed sha1 chrt -i 0 openssl speed sha1 renice 19 -p $$; ionice -c3 -p $$ Interactive monitoring watch -t -n1 uptime htop -d 5 iotop # watch -d -n30 "nice ps_mem.py | tail -n $((${LINES:-12}-2))" # iftop # mtr www.pixelbeat.org Useful utilities pv < /dev/zero > /dev/null wkhtml2pdf http://.../linux_commands.html linux_commands.pdf timeout 1 sleep 3 Networking python -m SimpleHTTPServer openssl s_client -connect www.google.com:443 </dev/null 2>&0 | openssl x509 -dates -noout

Search paths and data with full context. Use n to iterate Output attributes for all directories leading to a file name

Rate limit apt-get to 42KB/s Download url at 1AM to current dir Restart apache if config is OK Run a low priority command (openssl benchmark) Run a low priority command (more effective than nice) Make shell (script) low priority. Use for non interactive tasks Clock with system load Better top (scrollable, tree view, lsof/strace integration, ...) What's doing I/O What's using RAM What's using the network. See also iptraf ping and traceroute combined Progress Viewer for data copying from files and pipes Make a pdf of a web page run a command with bounded time. See also timeout Serve current directory tree at http://$HOSTNAME:8000/ Display the date range for a site's certs Display the server headers for a

curl -I www.pixelbeat.org

web site # lsof -i tcp:80 # httpd -S vim scp://user@remote//path/to/file curl -s http://www.pixelbeat.org/pixelbeat.asc | gpg --import tc qdisc add dev lo root handle 1:0 netem delay 20msec tc qdisc del dev lo root Notification echo "DISPLAY=$DISPLAY xmessage cooker" | at "NOW +30min" notify-send "subject" "message" echo "mail -s 'go home' [email protected] < /dev/null" | at 17:30 uuencode file name | mail -s subject [email protected] Better default settings (useful in your .bashrc) # tail -s.1 -f /var/log/messages seq 100 | tail -n $((${LINES:-12}-2)) # tcpdump -s0 Useful functions/aliases (useful in your .bashrc) md () { mkdir -p "$1" && cd "$1"; } strerror() { python -c "import os; print os.strerror($1)"; } plot() { { echo 'plot "-"' "$@"; cat; } | gnuplot -persist; } hili() { e="$1"; shift; grep --col=always -Eih "$e|$" "$@"; } alias hd='od -Ax -tx1z -v' alias realpath='readlink -f' ord() { printf "0x%x\n" "'$1"; } chr() { printf $(printf '\\%03o\\n' "$1"); } Change to a new directory Display the meaning of an errno Plot stdin. (e.g: seq 1000 | sed 's/.*/s(&)/' | bc -l | plot) highlight occurences of expr. (e.g: env | hili $USER) Hexdump. (usage e.g.: hd /proc/self/cmdline | less) Canonicalize path. (usage e.g.: realpath ~/../$USER) shell version of the ord() function shell version of the chr() function Display file additions more responsively Display as many lines as possible without scrolling Capture full network packets Popup reminder Display a gnome popup notification Email reminder Send a file via email What's using port 80 Display a list of apache virtual hosts Edit remote file using local vim. Good for high latency links Import a gpg key from the web Add 20ms latency to loopback device (for testing) Remove latency added above

ansi2html.sh | mail -a "Content-Type: text/html" [email protected] Send/Generate HTML email

Multimedia DISPLAY=:0.0 import -window root orig.png convert -filter catrom -resize '600x>' orig.png 600px_wide.png mplayer -ao pcm -vo null -vc dummy /tmp/Flash* ffmpeg -i filename.avi ffmpeg -f x11grab -s xga -r 25 -i :0 -sameq demo.mpg DVD for i in $(seq 9); do ffmpeg -i $i.avi -target pal-dvd $i.mpg; done dvdauthor -odvd -t -v "pal,4:3,720xfull" *.mpg;dvdauthor -odvd -T growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video dvd Unicode python -c "import unicodedata as u; print u.name(unichr(0x2028))" Lookup a unicode character uconv -f utf8 -t utf8 -x nfc printf '\300\200' | iconv -futf8 -tutf8 >/dev/null printf 'TF8\n' | LANG=C grep --color=always '[^ -~]\+' fc-match -s "sans:lang=zh" Development gcc -march=native -E -v -</dev/null 2>&1|sed -n 's/.*-mar/-mar/p' for i in $(seq 4); do { [ $i = 1 ] && wget http://url.ie/6lko -qO-|| ./a.out; } | tee /dev/tty | gcc -xc - 2>/dev/null; done Show autodetected gcc tuning params. See also gcccpuopt Compile and execute C code from stdin Show all predefined macros Show all glibc feature macros Debug showing source code context in separate windows List udev attributes of a device, for matching rules etc. See how udev rules are applied for a device Normalize combining characters Validate UTF-8 Highlight non printable ASCII chars in UTF-8 List font match order for language and style Convert video to the correct encoding and aspect for DVD Build DVD file system. Use 16:9 for widescreen input Burn DVD file system to disc Take a (remote) screenshot Shrink to width, computer gen images or screenshots Extract audio from flash video to audiodump.wav Display info about multimedia file Capture video of an X display

cpp -dM /dev/null echo "#include <features.h>" | cpp -dN | grep "#define __USE_" gdb -tui udev udevadm info -a -p $(udevadm info -q path -n /dev/input/mouse0) udevadm test /sys/class/input/mouse0

# udevadm control --reload-rules

Reload udev rules after modification Show ACLs for file Allow a specific user to read file Delete a specific user's rights to file Set umask for a for a specific dir Show capabilities for a program Allow gtk program raw access to network Show SELinux context for file Set SELinux context for file (see also restorecon) Show all extended attributes (includes selinux,acls,...) Set arbitrary user attributes Split data to 2 commands (using process substitution) Compare a local and remote file (using process substitution) Restrict a command to certain processors Process files in parallel over available processors Sort separate data files over 2 processors

Extended Attributes (Note you may need to (re)mount with "acl" or "user_xattr" options) getfacl . setfacl -m u:nobody:r . setfacl -x u:nobody . setfacl --default -m group:users:rw- dir/ getcap file setcap cap_net_raw+ep your_gtk_prog stat -c%C . chcon ... file getfattr -m- -d . setfattr -n "user.foo" -v "bar" . BASH specific echo 123 | tee >(tr 1 a) | tr 1 b meld local_file <(ssh host cat remote_file) Multicore taskset -c 0 nproc find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 -P$(nproc) -n10 md5sum sort -m <(sort data1) <(sort data2) >data.sorted