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

Compare copies of a file with md5
I had the problem that the Md5 Sum of a file changed after copying it to my external disk. This unhandy command helped me to fix the problem.

List all commands present on system

Deleting / Ignoring lines from the top of a file

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"

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Create incremental backups of individual folders using find and tar-gzip
Problem: I wanted to backup user data individually, using and incremental method. In this example, all user data is located in "/mnt/storage/profiles", and about 25 folders inside, each with a username ( /mnt/storage/profiles/mike; /mnt/storage/profiles/lucy ...) I need each individual folder backed up, not the whole "/mnt/storage/profiles". So, using find while excluding directories depth and creating two variables (tarfile=username & desdir=destination), tar will create a .tgz file for each folder, resulting in a "mike_2013-12-05.tgz" and "lucy_2013-12-05.tgz".

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

Docker.io Stop and Remove all processes
Will stop all running containers, then remove all containers **This isn't for selectively handling containers, it removes everything**

List all symbolic links in current directory
For those who don't have the symlinks command, you can use readlink. This command is not straightforward because readlink is very picky. The backslash in front of 'ls' means not to use an alias (e.g. color escape codes from an aliased 'ls' could mess up readlink), and the -1 (one) means to print the entries separated by newlines. xargs -l (the letter L) means to process each input separated by newlines as separate commands.

Show all current listening programs by port and pid with SS instead of netstat


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: