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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.

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Quick access to the ascii table.

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"

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"

Print current running shell, PID
works as well as echo $0, but also prints process id, which pts you're using. echo $SHELL doesn't always get updated when changing shells, so this is a better solution than that. Just one more variation on a theme.

create dir tree
create tree of dir's in one command

Force logout after 24 hours idle
Shell timeout variables (TMOUT) can be very liberal about what is classified as 'activity', like having an editor open. This command string will terminate the login shell for an user with more than a day's idle time.

sort the output of the 'du' command by largest first, using human readable output.
In this case I'm just grabbing the next level of subdirectories (and same level regular files) with the --max-depth=1 flag. leaving out that flag will just give you finer resolution. Note that you have to use the -h switch with both 'du' and with 'sort.'

Switch to the previous branch used in git(1)
Very useful if you keep switching between the same two branches all the time.

tail: watch a filelog
-f file(s) to be monitorized -n number of last line to be printed on the screen in this example, the content of two files are displayed

Create a persistent connection to a machine
Create a persistent SSH connection to the host in the background. Combine this with settings in your ~/.ssh/config: Host host ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster no All the SSH connections to the machine will then go through the persisten SSH socket. This is very useful if you are using SSH to synchronize files (using rsync/sftp/cvs/svn) on a regular basis because it won't create a new socket each time to open an ssh connection.


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