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

pipe output of a command to your clipboard
In turn you can get the contents of your clipboard by typing xsel by itself with no arguments: $ xsel This command requires you to install the xsel utility which is free

View all new log messages in real time with color
This will show all changes in all log files under /var/log/ that are regular files and don't end with `gz` nor with a number

encrypt and post or get and decrypt from sprunge using gpg symmetric encryption option
create simple encrypted notes to yourself using a passphrase on sprunge.us

Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage

Put a console clock in top right corner
This puts a clock in the top right of the terminal. This version doesn't use tput, but uses escape codes

change ownership en masse of files owned by a specific user, including files and directories with spaces
In the example, uid 0 is root. foo:foo are the user:group you want to make owner and group. '.' is the "current directory and below." -print0 and -0 indicate that filenames and directories "are terminated by a null character instead of by whitespace."

underscore to camelCase

Restart Xen XAPI
Restarts the XAPI service on the host, mostly used by Xen Center. It does not affect any running VMs, just the Xen client tools that may be connected. On my list as XAPI frustratingly keeps running out of memory and getting killed off.

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

shell equivalent of a boss button
Nobody wants the boss to notice when you're slacking off. This will fill your shell with random data, parts of it highlighted. Note that 'highlight' is the Perl module App::highlight, not "a universal sourcecode to formatted text converter." You'll also need Term::ANSIColor.


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: