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

Find last reboot time
Displays time of last system boot

Edit your command in vim ex mode by <ctrl-f>
If you are in ex mode in vim i.e. you've pressed ':'. You can edit the current command by pressing <ctrl-f>

Show memory stats on Nexenta/Solaris

Human readable directory sizes for current directory, sorted descending

Stop procrastination on Facebook.com
or echo '127.0.0.1 facebook.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts Do not execute this command if you don't know what you are doing.

Connect to SMTP server using STARTTLS
Allows you to connect to an SMTP server over TLS, which is useful for debugging SMTP sessions. (Much like telnet to 25/tcp). Once connected you can manually issue SMTP commands in the clear (e.g. EHLO)

Check if a web page has changed last time checked.
Checks if a web page has changed. Put it into cron to check periodically. Change http://www.page.de/test.html and mail@mail.de for your needs.

Search some text from all files inside a directory

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.

FizzBuzz in one line of Bash
The (in)famous "FizzBuzz" programming challenge, answered in a single line of Bash code. The "|column" part at the end merely formats the output a bit, so if "column" is not installed on your machine you can simply omit that part. Without "|column", the solution only uses 75 characters. The version below is expanded to multiple lines, with comments added. for i in {1..100} # Use i to loop from "1" to "100", inclusive. do ((i % 3)) && # If i is not divisible by 3... x= || # ...blank out x (yes, "x= " does that). Otherwise,... x=Fizz # ...set x to the string "Fizz". ((i % 5)) || # If i is not divisible by 5, skip (there's no "&&")... x+=Buzz # ...Otherwise, append (not set) the string "Buzz" to x. echo ${x:-$i} # Print x unless it is blanked out. Otherwise, print i. done | column # Wrap output into columns (not part of the test).


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: