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

for newbies, how to get one line info about all /bin programs
Get simple description on each file from /bin dir, in list form, usefull for newbies.

Searches $PATH for files using grep
Best to put it in a file somewhere in your path. (I call the file spath) #!/bin/bash IFS=:; find $PATH | grep $1 Usage: $ spath php

Filter IPs out of files

Convert wmv into avi

Display the history and optionally grep
Place this in your .bash_profile and you can use it two different ways. If you issue 'h' on its own, then it acts like the history command. If you issue: $ h cd Then it will display all the history with the word 'cd'

Remove specific versions of old kernels (Ubuntu/Debian)
If, for example, you want to remove all kernels and headers but the last three versions, you can't use one of that magic all-in-one "remove old stuff" commands. With this simple but elegant command you can remove a range of versions, or a list of versions with e.g. {14,16,20}.

Delete files older than..
This command will delete files i a given path (/dir_name) , which older than given time in days (-mtime +5 will delete files older than five days.

use wget to check if a remote file exists

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
This version uses netcat to check a particular service.

Top 10 Memory Consuming Processes


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: