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

Shows what processes need to be restarted after system upgrade
emerge,apt-get,yum... all update your system. This will at some point replace either a runtime dependency or a process (which is still running). This oneliner will list what processes need to be restarted

Find out how old a web page is
I used to use the Firefox "View page info" feature a lot to determine how stale the web page I was looking at was. Now that I use mostly Chrome I miss that feature, so here is a command line alternative using wget. The -S says to display the server response, the --spider says to not download any files/pages, just fetch the header. The output goes to stderr, so to grep it you use 2>&1 to combine the stderr stream with stdout, the pipe that to grep for Last-Modified. You can use curl instead if you have it installed, like this: $ curl --head -s http://osswin.sourceforge.net | grep Mod

Display disk partition sizes
It is the same but more faster real 0m0,007s user 0m0,011s sys 0m0,000s with my solution real 0m0,038s user 0m0,044s sys 0m0,000s with your solution :)

faster version of ls *
I know its not much but is very useful in time consuming scripts (cron, rc.d, etc).

processes per user counter
use Linux ;)

Remove a range of lines from a file
Delete a range of line

Batch Convert SVG to PNG (in parallel)
Convert some SVG files into PNG using ImageMagick's convert command. Run the conversions in parallel to save time. This is safer than robinro's forkbomb approach :-) xargs runs four processes at a time -P4

Typing the current date ( or any string ) via a shortcut as if the keys had been actually typed with the hardware keyboard in any application.
That works in all softs, CLI or GUI... I don't want to waste time to all the time typing the same stuff . So, I have that command in my window manager shortcuts ( meta+l ). All the window managers have editable shortcuts AFAIK. If not, or you don't want to use it that way, you can easily use the xbindkeys soft. I you're using kde4, you can run : $ systemsettings then open "inputs actions" and create a new shortcut. For Gnome take a look there : http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-create-keyboard-shortcuts-in-gnome/ A more advanced one, with strings and newlines : $ xvkbd -xsendevent -text "---8

Determine what an process is actually doing

Do command when logged in from certain ips using ssh
Place in ~/.bashrc If you login to a ssh server from different ips, sometimes you want to do something specific for each. e.g., quickly go into screen -x session from a phone, but not your desktop.


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: