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

dont execute command just add it to history as a comment, handy if your command is not "complete" yet

Query wikipedia over DNS

Manually Pause/Unpause Firefox Process with POSIX-Signals
Continue with: $killall -CONT -m firefox Suspends all Firefox Threads. Results in Zero CPU load. Useful when having 100+ Tabs open and you temporarily need the power elsewhere. Be careful - might produce RACE CONDITIONS or LOCKUPS in other processes or FF itself. matching is case sensitive.

32 bits or 64 bits?
Easy and direct way to find this out.

HourGlass
Displays an animated hourglass for x amount of seconds

Sort a character string
Sorts a character string, using common shell commands.

Display unique values of a column
Find the unique values of a column utilizing awk. Credits goes to here (posted by "era"): http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/77138-awk-print-distinct-col-values.html

Use socat to emulate an SMTP mail SERVER
Lots of scripts show you how to use socat to send an email to an SMTP server; this command actually emulates an SMTP server! It assumes the client is only sending to one recipient, and it's not at all smart, but it'll capture the email into a log file and the client will stop retrying. I used this to diagnose what emails were being sent by cron and subsequently discarded, but you can use it for all sorts of things.

Search some text from all files inside a directory

For finding out if something is listening on a port and if so what the daemon is.
See what's listening on your IPv4 ports on FreeBSD.


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: