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Awesome Bash Commands

A curated list of awesome Bash useful commands. Inspired by awesome-shell and bash-handbook.

Table of Contents

• Files and directories
• Paths
• Devices
• Users and Groups
• Date & Time
• Network
• Miscellaneous
• Other Awesome Lists

Files and directories

List files sorted by extension

ls -l -X
# Or
ls -l --sort=extension

Create a symbolic link for one directory or file

ln -s /var/www/html ~/www
ln -s ~/my/large/path/file.txt ~/myfile.txt

Change permissions for a symbolic link only

chmod -h 770 ~/www
chown -h www-data:www-data ~/www

Find octal permissions of one file or directory

stat -c "%a %n" /var/www/html
# 770 /var/www/html

Add sticky permissions to one directory and subdirectories

find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \

Note: Any new file created will have the same permissions as the root folder

Create one empty file in current directory and subdirectories

find ./my/current/directory -type d -exec touch {}/.gitignore \;

Delete one specific file of current directory and subdirectories

find ./my/current/directory -name ".gitignore" -type f -delete

Copy file content to clipboard

Copy shell command output to clipboard

cat myfile.txt | xclip -selection c

Copy entire directory to destination

cp -avr /my/current/directory /destination/directory
# Or
rsync -av /my/current/directory /destination/directory

Copy entire directory files only to destination with exclude option

rsync -har --progress --exclude .git /current/directory/. /destination/directory

Show the space usage of file or directory

Show the space usage of file or directory (recursive) in human readable format.

du -sh /var/log/dnf.librepo.log
# 4,1M	/var/log/dnf.librepo.log

du -sh /var/log
# 2,2G	/var/log

Show size of one symbolic link (file or directory)

du -Hsh $(which dart)
# 21M	/usr/local/bin/dart

Show top ten of biggest directories

du -hS /home/user/some/directory | sort -rh | head -10
# 90G	/home/user/some/directory/big-dir
# 10G	/home/user/some/directory/subdir/another-big-dir
# ...

Delete all files in directory by pattern

find /usr/local/apache/logs/archive/ -name '*2017.gz' -delete

Move files by pattern

This command move all *.js files into *.ts files (move equivalent)

find src/ -type f -name "*.js" -exec bash -c 'mv {} `echo {} | sed -e "s/.js/.ts/g"`' \;

Clean temporary directory

rm -rf /tmp/* /tmp/.*

Calculate gzip size of one no compressed file

gzip -c FILENAME.txt | wc -c | awk '{
if ($1 > 1000 ^ 3) {
  print($1 / (1000 ^ 3)"G")
} else if ($1 > 1000 ^ 2) {
  print($1 / (1000 ^ 2)"M")
} else if ($1 > 1000) {
  print($1 / 1000"K")
} else {
  print($1)"b"
}}'

# 560K

Paths

Show the full path of a command

which bash
# /usr/bin/bash

which git node
# /usr/bin/git
# /usr/bin/node

Show the resolved path of a symbolic link

realpath ~/www
# /usr/share/nginx/html

Determine the current directory

pwd
# /home/my/current/directory

Devices

Display file system disk space usage with total

Show the file system disk space usage in human readable format.

df -h --total
# Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
# devtmpfs        487M     0  487M   0% /dev
# tmpfs           497M     0  497M   0% /dev/shm
# tmpfs           497M  508K  496M   1% /run
# tmpfs           497M     0  497M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
# /dev/vda1        30G  2.7G   26G  10% /
# tmpfs           100M     0  100M   0% /run/user/0
# total           2.2T  600G  100G  20% -

Display system memory information with total

free -h --total
#               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
# Mem:           200G         60G        100G        262M         30G        180G
# Swap:            0B          0B          0B
# Total:         200G         60G        100G

or

cat /proc/meminfo
# MemTotal:       183815530 kB
# MemFree:        101918660 kB
# MemAvailable:   123712410 kB
# ....

Tip: Pipe grep to filter your results. E.g cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal

Mount a FAT32 USB device

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/usb

Increase temporary directory size

mount -o remount,size=5G /tmp/

Users and Groups

Switch user and execute command immediately

sudo -Hu root fish

Add an existing user to existing group

usermod -a -G ftp john

Date & Time

Show extended ISO format Date (ISO 8601)

date "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%m:%S"
# 2018-09-13T10:09:26

Network

Show current IP address

ifconfig | awk '/<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>/ { getline; print $2 }'
# or
ifconfig | grep -E "([0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}" | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{ print $2 }' | cut -f2 -d: | head -n1

Miscellaneous

Generate random numbers

a)

od -vAn -N64 < /dev/urandom | tr '\n' ' ' | sed "s/ //g" | head -c 32
# 03121617301002504516642404031105

b)

env LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc "0-9" < /dev/urandom | head -c 32 | xargs
# 50569696992247151969921987764342

Change head value to truncate the result's length.

Generate random alphanumerics

a) Alphanumeric only

base64 /dev/urandom | tr -d '/+' | head -c 32 | xargs
# 3udiq6F74alwcPwXzIDWSnjRYQXcxiyl

b) Alphanumeric with a custom chars set

env LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc "\$%^&*()-+=" < /dev/urandom | head -c 32 | xargs
# yiMg^Cha=Zh$6Xh%zDQAyBH1SI6Po(&P

Generate a random hash

od -vAn -N64 < /dev/urandom | tr '\n' ' ' | sed "s/ //g" | openssl dgst -sha256 | sed "s/-//g"
# 7adf57e0a90b32ce0e1f446268dbd62b583c649a2e71a426519c6e9c0006b143

Openssl digest algorithms supported: md5, md4, md2, sha1, sha, sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512, mdc2 and ripemd160

Generate a random UUID

uuidgen | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]"
# D2DA7D0C-ABAA-4866-9C97-61791C9FEC89

Generate 1 million of unique random phone numbers

This command generate one million of unique random phone numbers (random permutations) fast using GNU/Linux shuf command. Use sed command for customize each number format. For example for add some prefix or suffix. Remember shuf is not limited to numbers only.

shuf -i 100000000-999999999 -n 1000000 | sed -e 's/^/51/' > gsm.txt

Other Awesome Lists

• awesome-shell
• awesome-fish
• awesome-zsh

Contributions

Please check out the contribution file.

License

To the extent possible under law, José Luis Quintana has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.