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

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

log a command to console and to 2 files separately stdout and stderr

Analyse writing style of writing style of a document
Style analyses the surface characteristics of the writing style of a document. It prints various readability grades, length of words, sentences and paragraphs. It can further locate sentences with certain characteristics. If no files are given, the document is read from standard input. style is part of "diction" package

Copy a file over SSH without SCP

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Create a backdoor on a machine to allow remote connection to bash
This will launch a listener on the machine that will wait for a connection on port 1234. When you connect from a remote machine with something like : nc 192.168.0.1 1234 You will have console access to the machine through bash.

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"

Stat each file in a directory
This will run stat on each file in the directory.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Find a file's package or list a package's contents.
This is the fastest method to search the Debian package database. Requires the dlocate package. The dlocate db updates periodically, but you may force an update with # dlocate-update


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: