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

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"

Complex string encoding with sed
Pipe | avoid escaping occurences problems in using sed and make it easier to use

Group OR'd commands where you expect only one to work
Something to stuff in an alias when you are working in multiple environments. The double-pipe OR will fall through until one of the commands succeeds, and the rest won't be executed. Any STDERR will fall out, but the STDOUT from the correct command will bubble out of the parenthesis to the less command, or some other command you specify.

Google Spell Checker
I took matthewbauer's cool one-liner and rewrote it as a shell function that returns all the suggestions or outputs "OK" if it doesn't find anything wrong. It should work on ksh, zsh, and bash. Users that don't have tee can leave that part off like this: $spellcheck(){ typeset y=$@;curl -sd "$y" https://google.com/tbproxy/spell|sed -n '/s="[1-9]"/{s/]*>/ /g;s/\t/ /g;s/ *\(.*\)/Suggestions: \1\n/g;p}';}

Speak & Spell-esque glitch sounds
The Speak & Spell's sound chip uses a compressed audio format called "linear predictive coding". This command will read random bytes and attempt to decompress them as if it were audio data compressed in this format, then play it. This results in a unique sound which is similar to a glitching Speak & Spell.

Find the ratio between ram usage and swap usage.
it provides the ratio used for the RAM and The SWAP under Linux. When swappiness is high, Swap usage is high. When swappiness is low, Ram usage is high.

Runs a command without hangups.
The improvement is that you can re-attach to the screen at a later point.

Continuously listen on a port and respond with a fixed message with netcat (and respond to kill signals)
`while true`: do forever `nc -l -p 4300 -c 'echo hello'`: this is the but anything can go here really `test $? -gt 0 && break`: this checks the return code for ctrl^c or the like and quite the loop, otherwise in order to kill the loop you'd have to get the parent process id and kill it.

Change Title of Terminal Window to Verbose Info useful at Login
I usually have 5 or more ssh connections to various servers, and putting this command in my .bash_profile file makes my putty window or x terminal window title change to this easily recognizable and descriptive text. Includes the username, group, server hostname, where I am connecting from (for SSH tunneling), which device pts, current server load, and how many processes are running. You can also use this for your PROMPT_COMMAND variable, which updates the window title to the current values each time you exec a command. I prefix running this in my .bash_profile with $ [[ ! -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] && which makes sure it only does this when connecting via SSH with a TTY. Here's some rougher examples from http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html $ # If set, the value is executed as a command prior to issuing each primary prompt. $ #H=$((hostname || uname -n) 2>/dev/null | sed 1q);W=$(whoami) $ #export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${W}@${H}:${PWD/#$HOME/~} ${SSH_TTY/\/dev\//} [`uptime|sed -e "s/.*: \([^,]*\).*/\1/" -e "s/ //g"`]\007"' $ #PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;`id -un`:`id -gn`@`hostname||uname -n 2>/dev/null|sed 1q` `command who -m|sed -e "s%^.* \(pts/[0-9]*\).*(\(.*\))%[\1] (\2)%g"` [`uptime|sed -e "s/.*: \([^,]*\).*/\1/" -e "s/ //g"` / `command ps aux|wc -l`]\007"' $ #[[ -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] || export PROMPT_COMMAND $ #[[ -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] && [[ -f /dev/stdout ]] && SSH_TTY=/dev/stdout And here's a simple function example for setting the title: $ function set_window_title(){ echo -e "\033]0; ${1:-$USER@$HOST - $SHLVL} \007"; }

Get info about a GitHub project
In this example we search for 'vim' but vim doesn't have a project on github right now. That's ok, this command still searches for every project that has 'vim' in their description (forks, plugins, etc). To get XML or JSON output just replace 'yaml' in the url with 'xml' or 'json'.


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: