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

Show Apt/Dpkg configuration
Shows all configurations to apt and dpkg, rarely changed, you probably still have the default configuration. Go ahead and explore your configuration if you dare, perhaps change your apt-cache directory, Dir::Cache "var/cache/apt/"; or the names of the log files.

Rename files in batch

use xxd to create the wake on lan magicpacket and write to pcap file
just set macdst to the mac address of the system you wish to wake up, the macsrc is optional but helps use tcpreplay to broadcast or wireshark to view

Get a list of the top 10 heaviest tables in your mysql database - useful for performance diagnostics

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Alias to edit and source your .bashrc file
Place the line above in your ~/.bahsrc file. Now every time you issue the 'vb' command, you invoke the vim editor to edit it, then source it so the changes take effect immediately. Notes: * This mechanism is not working well if your .bashrc contains commands that should not be sourced more than once. * This trick also work for your csh or tclsh users: place the following line in your ~/.cshrc file: alias vc 'vim ~/.cshrc; source ~/.cshrc Thank you adzap for pointing out the missing quote

Insert the last argument of the previous command
for example if you did a: $ ls -la /bin/ls then $ ls !$ is equivalent to doing a $ ls /bin/ls

Compare two CSV files, discarding any repeated lines
The value for the sort command's -k argument is the column in the CSV file to sort on. In this example, it sorts on the second column. You must use some form of the sort command in order for uniq to work properly.

List processes sorted by CPU usage

ls -hog --> a more compact ls -l
I often deal with long file names and the 'ls -l' command leaves very little room for file names. An alternative is to use the -h -o and -g flags (or together, -hog). * The -h flag produces human-readable file size (e.g. 91K instead of 92728) * The -o suppresses the owner column * The -g suppresses the group column Since I use to alias ll='ls -l', I now do alias ll='ls -hog'


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: