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What are some of your most useful or favorite terminal commands? (piefed.social)
submitted 3 weeks ago by marighost@piefed.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I've been setting up a new Proxmox server and messing around with VMs, and wanted to know what kind of useful commands I'm missing out on. Bonus points for a little explainer.

Journalctl | grep -C 10 'foo' was useful for me when I needed to troubleshoot some fstab mount fuckery on boot. It pipes Journalctl (boot logs) into grep to find 'foo', and prints 10 lines before and after each instance of 'foo'.

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[-] jim3692@discuss.online 2 points 3 weeks ago

docker run --rm -it --privileged --pid=host debian:12 nsenter -a -t1 "$(which bash)"

If your user is in the docker group, and you are not running rootless Docker, this command opens a bash shell as root.

How it works:

  • docker run --rm -it creates a temporary container and attaches it to the running terminal
  • --privileged disables some of the container's protections
  • --pid=host attaches the container to the host's PID namespace, allowing it to access all running processes
  • debian:12 uses the Debian 12 image
  • nsenter -a -t1 enters all the namespaces of the process with PID 1, which is the host's init since we use --pid=host
  • "$(which bash)" finds the path of the host's bash and runs it inside the namespaces (plain bash may not work on NixOS hosts)
[-] noughtnaut@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

So you're running bash "as if you're on the host systen". What's the benefit?

[-] jim3692@discuss.online 1 points 3 weeks ago

I just wanted to show how Docker can be abused for privilege escalation, when it's not properly configured

this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
165 points (98.2% liked)

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