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

Convert flv without re-encoding

check open ports without netstat or lsof

List available upgrades from apt without upgrading the system

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)

Print number of mb of free ram
This will show the amount of physical RAM that is left unused by the system.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Clean up after a poorly-formed tar file
These days, most software distributed in tar files will just contain a directory at the top level, but some tar files don't have this and can leave you with a mess of files in the current folder if you blindly execute $ tar zxvf something.tar.gz This command can help you clean up after such a mistake. However, note that this has the potential to do bad things if someone has been *really* nasty with filenames.

Using a single sudo to run multiple && arguments
This will also work with bash instead of sh shell sudo bash -c 'apt update -y && apt upgrade -y'

Show top running processes by the number of open filehandles they have
I think I could cut down the number of pipes here, any suggestions?

Show directories in the PATH, one per line
Shorter version.


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: