All commands (14,187)

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

Find unused IPs on a given subnet

see who's using DOM storage a/k/a Web Storage, super cookies
Someone over at Mozilla dot Org probably said, "I know, let's create a super-duper universal replacement for browser cookies that are persistent and even more creepy and then NOT give our browser users the tools they need to monitor, read, block or selectively remove them!" . This will let you see all the DOM object users in all your firefox profiles. Feel free to toss a `| sort -u` on the end to remove dupes. . I highly recommend you treat these as "session cookies" by scripting something that deletes this sqlite database during each firefox start-up. . note: does not do anything for so-called "flash cookies"

Add line number count as C-style comments
I often find the need to number enumerations and other lists when programming. With this command, create a new file called 'inputfile' with the text you want to number. Paste the contents of 'outputfile' back into your source file and fix the tabbing if necessary. You can also change this to output hex numbering by changing the "%02d" to "%02x". If you need to start at 0 replace "NR" with "NR-1". I adapted this from http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/20/easily-add-line-numbers-to-a-text-file/.

list files recursively by size

List only executables installed by a debian package
I wanted to view only executables installed by a package. This seemed to work. There's got to be easier way, please share. Note: (1) Replace iptables with the package name of your interest (2) The command will trash any existing environment variable named 'lst' (3) Instead if you are interested in viewing just .ko or .so files installed by this package, then that would be easy: $ dpkg -L iptables | grep "\.[sk]o$"

show ALL iptable rules
show your current iptable rules from every available iptable table

bypass any aliases and functions for the command
A simple directive which disables all aliases and functions for the command immediately following it. Shortcut for the bash built-in 'command' - "command linefoo". Think, {sic}...

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Uniquely (sort of) color text so you can see changes
Colorify colors input by converting the text to a number and then performing modulo 7 on it. This resulting number is used as the color escape code. This can be used to color the results of commands with complex outputs (like "482279054165371") so if any of the digits change, there's a good chance the color will change too. I say good chance because there's only 7 unique colors here, so assuming you were watching random numbers, there would be a 6/7 chance that the color would change when the number changed. This should really only be used to help quickly identify when things change, but should not be the only thing relied upon to positively assert that an output has not changed.


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: