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

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"

check site ssl certificate dates
remotely connects to an https site, fetches the ssl certificate and displays the valid dates for the cert

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Get the serial numbers from HP RAID
This dumps serial numbers of all the drives but HP warranty check does not say they are valid ...

Dump a configuration file without comments or whitespace...
A short, *easy-er* to remember command for stripping whitespace and comments from a config file, (or any file for that matter). Remember regex as: slash, space, star. pound, slash, bar. pointy-hat, dollar. (or "caret, dollar" if you must) :-P

Create backup copy of file, adding suffix of the date of the file modification (NOT today's date)
If your `date` command has `-r` option, you don't need `stat`

Enable ** to expand files recursively (>=bash-4.0)
Since bash 4.0, you can use ** to recursively expand to all files in the current directory. This behaviour is disabled by default, this command enables it (you'd best put it in your .profile). See the sample output for clarification. In my opinion this is much better than creating hacks with find and xargs when you want to pass files to an application.

Facebook Email Scraper
(Apparently it is too long so I put it in sample output, I hope that is OK.) Run the long command (or put it in your .bashrc) in sample output then run: $ fbemailscraper YourFBEmail Password Voila! Your contacts' emails will appear. Facebook seems to have gotten rid of the picture encoding of emails and replaced it with a text based version making it easy to scrape! Needs curl to run and it was made pretty quickly so there might be bugs.


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: