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

Simple addicting bash game.
Really bored during class so I made this... Basically, you hold period (or whatever) and hit enter after a second and you need to make the next line of periods the same length as the previous line... My record was 5 lines of the same length. It's best if you do it one handed with your pointer on period and ring on enter.

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"

uniq for unsorted data

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

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

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"

One line Perl Script to determine the largest file sizes on a Linux Server
This one line Perl script will display the smallest to the largest files sizes in all directories on a server.

list and sort files by size in reverse order (file size in human readable output)
This command list and sort files by size and in reverse order, the reverse order is very helpful when you have a very long list and wish to have the biggest files at the bottom so you don't have scrool up. The file size info is in human readable output, so ex. 1K..234M...3G Tested with Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Edition)

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

Get the size of all the directories in current directory (Sorted Human Readable)
as per eightmillion's comment. Simply economical :)


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: