| Command |
Description |
| • |
apropos whatis |
Show commands pertinent to string. See also threadsafe |
| • |
man -t ascii | ps2pdf – > ascii.pdf |
make a pdf of a manual page |
| |
which command |
Show full path name of command |
| |
time command |
See how long a command takes |
| • |
time cat |
Start stopwatch. Ctrl-d to stop. See also sw |
| dir navigation |
| • |
cd - |
Go to previous directory |
| • |
cd |
Go to $HOME directory |
| |
(cd dir && command) |
Go to dir, execute command and return to current dir |
| • |
pushd . |
Put current dir on stack so you can popd back to it |
| file searching |
| • |
alias l=’ls -l –color=auto’ |
quick dir listing |
| • |
ls -lrt |
List files by date. See also newest and find_mm_yyyy |
| • |
ls /usr/bin | pr -T9 -W$COLUMNS |
Print in 9 columns to width of terminal |
| |
find -name ‘*.[ch]‘ | xargs grep -E ‘expr’ |
Search ‘expr’ in this dir and below. See also findrepo |
| |
find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -F ‘example’ |
Search all regular files for ‘example’ in this dir and below |
| |
find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F ‘example’ |
Search all regular files for ‘example’ in this dir |
| |
find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do echo $dir; echo cmd2; done |
Process each item with multiple commands (in while loop) |
| • |
find -type f ! -perm -444 |
Find files not readable by all (useful for web site) |
| • |
find -type d ! -perm -111 |
Find dirs not accessible by all (useful for web site) |
| • |
locate -r ‘file[^/]*\.txt’ |
Search cached index for names. This re is like glob *file*.txt |
| • |
look reference |
Quickly search (sorted) dictionary for prefix |
| • |
grep –color reference /usr/share/dict/words |
Highlight occurances of regular expression in dictionary |
| archives and compression |
| |
gpg -c file |
Encrypt file |
| |
gpg file.gpg |
Decrypt file |
| |
tar -c dir/ | bzip2 > dir.tar.bz2 |
Make compressed archive of dir/ |
| |
bzip2 -dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar -x |
Extract archive (use gzip instead of bzip2 for tar.gz files) |
| |
tar -c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote ‘dd of=dir.tar.gz.gpg’ |
Make encrypted archive of dir/ on remote machine |
| |
find dir/ -name ‘*.txt’ | tar -c –files-from=- | bzip2 > dir_txt.tar.bz2 |
Make archive of subset of dir/ and below |
| |
find dir/ -name ‘*.txt’ | xargs cp -a –target-directory=dir_txt/ –parents |
Make copy of subset of dir/ and below |
| |
( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) |
Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to /where/to/ dir |
| |
( cd /dir/to/copy && tar -c . ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) |
Copy (with permissions) contents of copy/ dir to /where/to/ |
| |
( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ssh -C user@remote ‘cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p’ |
Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to remote:/where/to/ dir |
| |
dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh user@remote ‘dd of=sda.gz’ |
Backup harddisk to remote machine |
| rsync (Network efficient file copier: Use the –dry-run option for testing) |
| |
rsync -P rsync://rsync.server.com/path/to/file file |
Only get diffs. Do multiple times for troublesome downloads |
| |
rsync –bwlimit=1000 fromfile tofile |
Locally copy with rate limit. It’s like nice for I/O |
| |
rsync -az -e ssh –delete ~/public_html/ remote.com:’~/public_html’ |
Mirror web site (using compression and encryption) |
| |
rsync -auz -e ssh remote:/dir/ . && rsync -auz -e ssh . remote:/dir/ |
Synchronize current directory with remote one |
| ssh (Secure SHell) |
| |
ssh $USER@$HOST command |
Run command on $HOST as $USER (default command=shell) |
| • |
ssh -f -Y $USER@$HOSTNAME xeyes |
Run GUI command on $HOSTNAME as $USER |
| |
scp -p -r $USER@$HOST: file dir/ |
Copy with permissions to $USER’s home directory on $HOST |
| |
scp -c arcfour $USER@$LANHOST: bigfile |
Use faster crypto for local LAN. This might saturate GigE |
| |
ssh -g -L 8080:localhost:80 root@$HOST |
Forward connections to $HOSTNAME:8080 out to $HOST:80 |
| |
ssh -R 1434:imap:143 root@$HOST |
Forward connections from $HOST:1434 in to imap:143 |
| |
ssh-copy-id $USER@$HOST |
Install public key for $USER@$HOST for password-less log in |
| wget (multi purpose download tool) |
| • |
(cd dir/ && wget -nd -pHEKk http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html) |
Store local browsable version of a page to the current dir |
| |
wget -c http://www.example.com/large.file |
Continue downloading a partially downloaded file |
| |
wget -r -nd -np -l1 -A ‘*.jpg’ http://www.example.com/dir/ |
Download a set of files to the current directory |
| |
wget ftp://remote/file[1-9].iso/ |
FTP supports globbing directly |
| • |
wget -q -O- http://www.pixelbeat.org/timeline.html | grep ‘a href’ | head |
Process output directly |
| |
echo ‘wget url’ | at 01:00 |
Download url at 1AM to current dir |
| |
wget –limit-rate=20k url |
Do a low priority download (limit to 20KB/s in this case) |
| |
wget -nv –spider –force-html -i bookmarks.html |
Check links in a file |
| |
wget –mirror http://www.example.com/ |
Efficiently update a local copy of a site (handy from cron) |
| networking (Note ifconfig, route, mii-tool, nslookup commands are obsolete) |
| |
ethtool eth0 |
Show status of ethernet interface eth0 |
| |
ethtool –change eth0 autoneg off speed 100 duplex full |
Manually set ethernet interface speed |
| |
iwconfig eth1 |
Show status of wireless interface eth1 |
| |
iwconfig eth1 rate 1Mb/s fixed |
Manually set wireless interface speed |
| • |
iwlist scan |
List wireless networks in range |
| • |
ip link show |
List network interfaces |
| |
ip link set dev eth0 name wan |
Rename interface eth0 to wan |
| |
ip link set dev eth0 up |
Bring interface eth0 up (or down) |
| • |
ip addr show |
List addresses for interfaces |
| |
ip addr add 1.2.3.4/24 brd + dev eth0 |
Add (or del) ip and mask (255.255.255.0) |
| • |
ip route show |
List routing table |
| |
ip route add default via 1.2.3.254 |
Set default gateway to 1.2.3.254 |
| • |
host pixelbeat.org |
Lookup DNS ip address for name or vice versa |
| • |
hostname -i |
Lookup local ip address (equivalent to host `hostname`) |
| • |
whois pixelbeat.org |
Lookup whois info for hostname or ip address |
| • |
netstat -tupl |
List internet services on a system |
| • |
netstat -tup |
List active connections to/from system |
| windows networking (Note samba is the package that provides all this windows specific networking support) |
| • |
smbtree |
Find windows machines. See also findsmb |
| |
nmblookup -A 1.2.3.4 |
Find the windows (netbios) name associated with ip address |
| |
smbclient -L windows_box |
List shares on windows machine or samba server |
| |
mount -t smbfs -o fmask=666,guest //windows_box/share /mnt/share |
Mount a windows share |
| |
echo ‘message’ | smbclient -M windows_box |
Send popup to windows machine (off by default in XP sp2) |
| text manipulation (Note sed uses stdin and stdout. Newer versions support inplace editing with the -i option) |
| |
sed ‘s/string1/string2/g’ |
Replace string1 with string2 |
| |
sed ‘s/\(.*\)1/\12/g’ |
Modify anystring1 to anystring2 |
| |
sed ‘/^ *#/d; /^ *$/d’ |
Remove comments and blank lines |
| |
sed ‘:a; /\\$/N; s/\\\n//; ta’ |
Concatenate lines with trailing \ |
| |
sed ‘s/[ \t]*$//’ |
Remove trailing spaces from lines |
| |
sed ‘s/\([`"$\]\)/\\\1/g’ |
Escape shell metacharacters active 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 |
| |
sed -n ‘s/.*<title>\(.*\)<\/title>.*/\1/ip;T;q’ |
Extract title from HTML web page |
| |
sed -i 42d ~/.ssh/known_hosts |
Delete a particular line |
| |
sort -t. -k1,1n -k2,2n -k3,3n -k4,4n |
Sort IPV4 ip addresses |
| • |
echo ‘Test’ | tr ‘[:lower:]‘ ‘[:upper:]‘ |
Case conversion |
| • |
tr -dc ‘[:print:]‘ < /dev/urandom |
Filter non printable characters |
| • |
tr -s ‘[:blank:]‘ ‘\t’ </proc/diskstats | cut -f4 |
cut fields separated 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) |
| |
sort file1 file2 | uniq |
Union of unsorted files |
| |
sort file1 file2 | uniq -d |
Intersection of unsorted files |
| |
sort file1 file1 file2 | uniq -u |
Difference of unsorted files |
| |
sort file1 file2 | uniq -u |
Symmetric Difference of unsorted files |
| |
join -t’\0′ -a1 -a2 file1 file2 |
Union of sorted files |
| |
join -t’\0′ file1 file2 |
Intersection of sorted files |
| |
join -t’\0′ -v2 file1 file2 |
Difference of sorted files |
| |
join -t’\0′ -v1 -v2 file1 file2 |
Symmetric Difference of sorted files |
| math |
| • |
echo ‘(1 + sqrt(5))/2′ | bc -l |
Quick math (Calculate ?). See also bc |
| • |
seq -f ’4/%g’ 1 2 99999 | paste -sd-+ | bc -l |
Calculate ? the unix way |
| • |
echo ‘pad=20; min=64; (100*10^6)/((pad+min)*8)’ | bc |
More complex (int) e.g. This shows max FastE packet rate |
| • |
echo ‘pad=20; min=64; print (100E6)/((pad+min)*8)’ | python |
Python handles scientific notation |
| • |
echo ‘pad=20; plot [64:1518] (100*10**6)/((pad+x)*8)’ | gnuplot -persist |
Plot FastE packet rate vs packet size |
| • |
echo ‘obase=16; ibase=10; 64206′ | bc |
Base conversion (decimal to hexadecimal) |
| • |
echo $((0x2dec)) |
Base conversion (hex to dec) ((shell arithmetic expansion)) |
| • |
units -t ’100m/9.58s‘ ‘miles/hour’ |
Unit conversion (metric to imperial) |
| • |
units -t ’500GB’ ‘GiB’ |
Unit conversion (SI to IEC prefixes) |
| • |
units -t ’1 googol’ |
Definition lookup |
| • |
seq 100 | (tr ‘\n’ +; echo 0) | bc |
Add a column of numbers. See also add and funcpy |
| calendar |
| • |
cal -3 |
Display a calendar |
| • |
cal 9 1752 |
Display a calendar for a particular month year |
| • |
date -d fri |
What date is it this friday. See also day |
| • |
[ $(date -d '12:00 +1 day' +%d) = '01' ] || exit |
exit a script unless it’s the last day of the month |
| • |
date –date=’25 Dec’ +%A |
What day does xmas fall on, this year |
| • |
date –date=’@2147483647′ |
Convert seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 UTC) to date |
| • |
TZ=’America/Los_Angeles’ date |
What time is it on west coast of US (use tzselect to find TZ) |
| • |
date –date=’TZ=”America/Los_Angeles” 09:00 next Fri’ |
What’s the local time for 9AM next Friday on west coast US |
| locales |
| • |
printf “%’d\n” 1234 |
Print number with thousands grouping appropriate to locale |
| • |
BLOCK_SIZE=\’1 ls -l |
Use locale thousands grouping in ls. See also l |
| • |
echo “I live in `locale territory`” |
Extract info from locale database |
| • |
LANG=en_IE.utf8 locale int_prefix |
Lookup locale info for specific country. See also ccodes |
| • |
locale -kc $(locale | sed -n ‘s/\(LC_.\{4,\}\)=.*/\1/p’) | less |
List fields available in locale database |
| recode (Obsoletes iconv, dos2unix, unix2dos) |
| • |
recode -l | less |
Show available conversions (aliases on each line) |
| |
recode windows-1252.. file_to_change.txt |
Windows “ansi” to local charset (auto does CRLF conversion) |
| |
recode utf-8/CRLF.. file_to_change.txt |
Windows utf8 to local charset |
| |
recode iso-8859-15..utf8 file_to_change.txt |
Latin9 (western europe) to utf8 |
| |
recode ../b64 < file.txt > file.b64 |
Base64 encode |
| |
recode /qp.. < file.qp > file.txt |
Quoted printable decode |
| |
recode ..HTML < file.txt > file.html |
Text to HTML |
| • |
recode -lf windows-1252 | grep euro |
Lookup table of characters |
| • |
echo -n 0×80 | recode latin-9/x1..dump |
Show what a code represents in latin-9 charmap |
| • |
echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..latin-9/x |
Show latin-9 encoding |
| • |
echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..utf-8/x |
Show utf-8 encoding |
| CDs |
| |
gzip < /dev/cdrom > cdrom.iso.gz |
Save copy of data cdrom |
| |
mkisofs -V LABEL -r dir | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz |
Create cdrom image from contents of dir |
| |
mount -o loop cdrom.iso /mnt/dir |
Mount the cdrom image at /mnt/dir (read only) |
| |
cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast |
Clear a CDRW |
| |
gzip -dc cdrom.iso.gz | cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom - |
Burn cdrom image (use dev=ATAPI -scanbus to confirm dev) |
| |
cdparanoia -B |
Rip audio tracks from CD to wav files in current dir |
| |
cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio -pad *.wav |
Make audio CD from all wavs in current dir (see also cdrdao) |
| |
oggenc –tracknum=$track track.cdda.wav -o track.ogg |
Make ogg file from wav file |
| disk space (See also FSlint) |
| • |
ls -lSr |
Show files by size, biggest last |
| • |
du -s * | sort -k1,1rn | head |
Show top disk users in current dir. See also dutop |
| • |
du -hs /home/* | sort -k1,1h |
Sort paths by easy to interpret disk usage |
| • |
df -h |
Show free space on mounted filesystems |
| • |
df -i |
Show free inodes on mounted filesystems |
| • |
fdisk -l |
Show disks partitions sizes and types (run as root) |
| • |
rpm -q -a –qf ‘%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n’ | sort -k1,1n |
List all packages by installed size (Bytes) on rpm distros |
| • |
dpkg-query -W -f=’${Installed-Size;10}\t${Package}\n’ | sort -k1,1n |
List all packages by installed size (KBytes) on deb distros |
| • |
dd bs=1 seek=2TB if=/dev/null of=ext3.test |
Create a large test file (taking no space). See also truncate |
| • |
> file |
truncate data of file or create an empty file |
| monitoring/debugging |
| • |
tail -f /var/log/messages |
Monitor messages in a log file |
| • |
strace -c ls >/dev/null |
Summarise/profile system calls made by command |
| • |
strace -f -e open ls >/dev/null |
List system calls made by command |
| • |
strace -f -e trace=write -e write=1,2 ls >/dev/null |
Monitor what’s written to stdout and stderr |
| • |
ltrace -f -e getenv ls >/dev/null |
List library calls made by command |
| • |
lsof -p $$ |
List paths that process id has open |
| • |
lsof ~ |
List processes that have specified path open |
| • |
tcpdump not port 22 |
Show network traffic except ssh. See also tcpdump_not_me |
| • |
ps -e -o pid,args –forest |
List processes in a hierarchy |
| • |
ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args –sort pcpu | sed ‘/^ 0.0 /d’ |
List processes by % cpu usage |
| • |
ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS |
List processes by mem (KB) usage. See also ps_mem.py |
| • |
ps -C firefox-bin -L -o pid,tid,pcpu,state |
List all threads for a particular process |
| • |
ps -p 1,$$ -o etime= |
List elapsed wall time for particular process IDs |
| • |
last reboot |
Show system reboot history |
| • |
free -m |
Show amount of (remaining) RAM (-m displays in MB) |
| • |
watch -n.1 ‘cat /proc/interrupts’ |
Watch changeable data continuously |
| • |
udevadm monitor |
Monitor udev events to help configure rules |
| system information (see also sysinfo) (‘#’ means root access is required) |
| • |
uname -a |
Show kernel version and system architecture |
| • |
head -n1 /etc/issue |
Show name and version of distribution |
| • |
cat /proc/partitions |
Show all partitions registered on the system |
| • |
grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo |
Show RAM total seen by the system |
| • |
grep “model name” /proc/cpuinfo |
Show CPU(s) info |
| • |
lspci -tv |
Show PCI info |
| • |
lsusb -tv |
Show USB info |
| • |
mount | column -t |
List mounted filesystems on the system (and align output) |
| • |
grep -F capacity: /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info |
Show state of cells in laptop battery |
| # |
dmidecode -q | less |
Display SMBIOS/DMI information |
| # |
smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours |
How long has this disk (system) been powered on in total |
| # |
hdparm -i /dev/sda |
Show info about disk sda |
| # |
hdparm -tT /dev/sda |
Do a read speed test on disk sda |
| # |
badblocks -s /dev/sda |
Test for unreadable blocks on disk sda |
| interactive (see also linux keyboard shortcuts) |
| • |
readline |
Line editor used by bash, python, bc, gnuplot, … |
| • |
screen |
Virtual terminals with detach capability, … |
| • |
mc |
Powerful file manager that can browse rpm, tar, ftp, ssh, … |
| • |
gnuplot |
Interactive/scriptable graphing |
| • |
links |
Web browser |
| • |
xdg-open . |
open a file or url with the registered desktop application |
service-website. At least in threory it works, we have started testing some of these new ideas and will keep you posted. So far we can find the country of the target hidden service-website but we need to come closer and get a pinpoint location without an IP address with our medthod of triangulation and data correlation – gAtO oUt
