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

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

tunnel vnc port
Foward vnc securely from exampleserver.com

watch process stack, sampled at 1s intervals
This command repeatedly gets the specified process' stack using pstack (which is an insanely clever and tiny wrapper for gdb) and displays it fullscreen. Since it updates every second, you rapidly get an idea of where your program is stuck or spending time. The 'tac' is used to make the output grow down, which makes it less jumpy. If the output is too big for your screen, you can always leave the 'tac' off to see the inner calls. (Or, better yet--get a bigger screen.) Caveats: Won't work with stripped binaries and probably not well with threads, but you don't want to strip your binaries or use threads anyway.

See system users

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.

Make changes in any profile available immediately/Change to default group
Changes your group to the default group, has the same effect as sourcing your profile/rc file (in any shell) or logging out and back in again.

One liner to parse all epubs in a directory and use the calibre ebook-convert utility to convert them to mobi format
all ebook-convert -options are optional. all you really need to pass ebook-convert is the incoming and outgoing names, with extensions. Has been tested on Ubuntu 10.10

Matrix Style

Count the words in any OpenOffice document (including Impress presentations)
OpenOffice, LibreOffice and OO Impress wordcount

Run TOP in Color, split 4 ways for x seconds - the ultimate ps command. Great for init scripts
One of my favorite ways to impress newbies (and old hats) to the power of the shell, is to give them an incredibly colorful and amazing version of the top command that runs once upon login, just like running fortune on login. It's pretty sweet believe me, just add this one-liner to your ~/.bash_profile -- and of course you can set the height to be anything, from 1 line to 1000! $ G=$(stty -g);stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2));top -n1; stty $G;unset G Doesn't take more than the below toprc file I've added below, and you get all 4 top windows showing output at the same time.. each with a different color scheme, and each showing different info. Each window would normally take up 1/4th of your screen when run like that - TOP is designed as a full screen program. But here's where you might learn something new today on this great site.. By using the stty command to change the terminals internal understanding of the size of your terminal window, you force top to also think that way as well. # save the correct settings to G var. $ G=$(stty -g) # change the number of rows to half the actual amount, or 50 otherwise $ stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2)) # run top non-interactively for 1 second, the output stays on the screen (half at least) $ top -n1 # reset the terminal back to the correct values, and clean up after yourself $ stty $G;unset G This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ], though the online version will be updated soon. Just think what else you could run like this! Note 1: I had to edit the toprc file out due to this site can't handle that (uploads/including code). So you can grab it from [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html my site ] Note 2: I had to come back and edit again because the links weren't being correctly parsed


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: