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

grep certain file types recursively
-exec works better and faster then using a pipe

Compress logs older than 7 days

Line Separator That is Width of Terminal
Creates a line seperator that will be the width of your window.

Dock Thunderbird in system tray and hide main window
Dock Thunderbird in system tray and hide main window. Very useful for startup scripts. Of course you can dock any app of your choice.

watch process stack, sampled at 1s intervals
This command repeatedly gets the specified process' stack using pstack (which is an insanely clever and tiny wrapper for gdb) and displays it fullscreen. Since it updates every second, you rapidly get an idea of where your program is stuck or spending time. The 'tac' is used to make the output grow down, which makes it less jumpy. If the output is too big for your screen, you can always leave the 'tac' off to see the inner calls. (Or, better yet--get a bigger screen.) Caveats: Won't work with stripped binaries and probably not well with threads, but you don't want to strip your binaries or use threads anyway.

Flush DNS cache in MacOS 10.5

a function to create a box of '=' characters around a given string.
First argument: string to put a box around. Second argument: character to use for box (default is '=') Same as command #4948, but shorter, and without the utility function.

let the cow suggest some commit messages for you

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

find all active IP addresses in a network
Have to run as superuser... but easier and more informational if you are looking for actual devices. Need to install arp-scan.


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: