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

Query well known ports list
Uses the file located in /etc/services

Extracting a range of pages from a PDF, using GhostScript
In this example we extract pages 14-17

Get absolut path to your bash-script
Another way of doing it that's a bit clearer. I'm a fan of readable code.

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"

Simple complete system backup excluding files or directories
You can exclude more system folders or individual files which are not necessary for the backup and can be recreated after the restore procedure, like /lost+found, /mnt, /media, /tmp, /usr ... Restoring the above backup procedure is as simple as becoming root and typing: $ tar zxpf backup.tgz -C / You can extract any file or directory out of the backup.tgz file for recovery, for instance, if you have a corrupt or mis-configured fstab file, you could simply issue the command: $ tar zxpf backup.tgz /ect/fstab -C / Other options: v add verbose option to see files processed A far safer solution is to restore the desired files under a different directory, and then compare, move, or update the files to their original locations afterward.

Recursively compare two directories and output their differences on a readable format

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

View the current number of free/used inodes in a file system
tune2fs also provides the same information . But the information does not give the current usage , it gives the information when the file system was last mounted. http://www.zaman4linux.in/2010/10/using-up-all-the-free-inodes.html

Continuously show wifi signal strength on a mac
The closer to zero the better.Credit to TheSeb on macrumors: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1289884

Download entire commandlinefu archive to single file
'jot' does not come with most *nix distros, so we need to use seq to make it work. This version tested good on Fedora 11.


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: