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"

Sprunge.us - CLI alternative to PasteBin.com
NAME sprunge: command line pastebin: SYNOPSIS | curl -F 'sprunge=

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

Generate a random password 30 characters long

cpu and memory usage top 10 under Linux
It's like `prstat -t` under Solaris

nmap IP block and autogenerate comprehensive Nagios service checks
More info here: http://nagioswiki.com/wiki/index.php/Autocreating_Nagios_Configuration_with_Nmap_and_Nmap2Nagios.pl

remove repeated pairs of characters e.g. "xtxtxtxt" will become "xt"
This will remove repeated characters e.g. echo "xtxtxtxt" | sed -ru 's/(..)\1{2,}/\1/g' the output will just be "xt"

Find longest running non-root processes on a machine
If you have ever been trying to look for a list of processes based on their elapsed time you don't need to look any further. This command lets you find the list of processes ordered in a reversed order (oldest at the top) that have been running for over an hour on your system. Any system processes are filtered out, leaving only user initiated ones in. I find it extremely useful for debugging and performance analysis.

prevent accidents while using wildcards
alternative for "echo rm *.txt". Just doubletab the command you are willing to use and it will show you the affected files.

Sysadmin day date of any given year
Calculate the date of Sysadmin day (last Friday of July) of any given year


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: