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

Write a bootable Linux .iso file directly to a USB-stick
Writes hybrid ISO directly to USB stick; replace /dev/sdb with USB device in question and the ISO image link with the link of your choice

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"

Kill all processes that listen to ports begin with 50 (50, 50x, 50xxx,...)
Run netstat as root (via sudo) to get the ID of the process listening on the desired socket. Use awk to 1) match the entry that is the listening socket, 2) matching the exact port (bounded by leading colon and end of column), 3) remove the trailing slash and process name from the last column, and finally 4) use the system(…) command to call kill to terminate the process. Two direct commands, netstat & awk, and one forked call to kill. This does kill the specific port instead of any port that starts with 50. I consider this to be safer.

mailx to send mails from console
It is the best way i found to send a mail from the console in my centos server.

Calculate the mean or average of a single column of numbers in a text file
single-column-numbers.txt is a text file with 22658 rows (numbers) in a single column. Each number can range from 0 to 134298679.533591 and the dot is for the decimals. This is done with perl because awk can't sum such high numbers.

wget multiple files (or mirror) from NTLM-protected Sharepoint
If you have to deal with MS Sharepoint which is (rarely, let's hope) used in e.g. certain corporate environments). This uses Cntlm. For single files, just use cURL -- its NTLM authentication works quite well. # /etc/cntlm.conf: # Username account # Domain domain # Password ############ # Proxy 10.20.30.40 (IP of the sharepoint site) # NoProxy * # Listen 3128

Append last argument to last command
Just like "!$", except it does it instantly. Then you can hit enter if you want.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Find the package that installed a command

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"


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: