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

Quick access to the ascii table.

See system users

Send keypresses to an X application
This is a (last resort) way to automate applications that provide no other ways for automation, it would send 'Hello world' to the currently active window. See the manpage (and the -text and -window entries) for how to send special characters and target specific windows. An example: Using xwininfo, I get the id of my XPlanet background window: alanceil@kvirasim:19:51:0:~> xwininfo xwininfo: Please select the window about which you would like information by clicking the mouse in that window. xwininfo: Window id: 0x3600001 "Xplanet 1.2.0" Absolute upper-left X: 0 (..etc..) Now I use xvkbd to tell it to close itself: xvkbd -xsendevent -window 0x3600001 -text "Q" Obviously, the best way is to put these commands in a shellscript - just make sure to include a short sleep (sleep .1 should suffice) after each xvkbd call, or some programs will become confused.

See KeepAlive counters on tcp connections
See connection's tcp timers

Display the human-readable sizes of all files and folders in the current directory with 3 decimal places
To sort the list by file/directory size, insert `sort -n |` before `awk`.

Show drive names next to their full serial number (and disk info)
Scrap everything and use `gawk` to do all the magic, since it's like the future or something. $ gawk 'match($11, /[a-z]{3}$/) && match($9, /^ata-/) { gsub("../", ""); print $11,"\t",$9 }' Yank out only ata- lines that have a drive letter (ignore lines with partitions). Then strip ../../ and print the output. Yay awk. Be sure to see the alternatives as my initial command is listed there. This one is a revision of the original.

return external ip
Return IP information about your external ip address with JSON format

Create a new file

va - alias for editing aliases
When setting up a new aliases file, or having creating a new file.. About every time after editing an aliases file, I source it. This alias makes editing alias a bit easier and they are useful right away. Note if the source failed, it will not echo "aliases sourced". Sub in vi for your favorite editor, or alter for ksh, sh, etc.

wrap long lines of a text
wraps text lines at the specified width (90 here). -s option is to force to wrap on blank characters -b count bytes instead of columns


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: