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

Get your Tweets from the command line
Gets the latest Tweets in your friends timeline from Twitter. Uses curl and xmlstarlet.

Get info about a GitHub user
In this example 'git' is the user name and the output format is YAML but you can change this to XML or JSON, eg: curl http://github.com/api/v1/json/usernamehere

Release memory used by the Linux kernel on caches
The Linux kernel uses unused memory in caches. When you execute "free" you never get the "real" available memory.

Clear the terminal screen

Ping a URL sending output to file and STDOUT
The tee (as in "T" junction) command is very useful for redirecting output to two places.

Generate Sha1, MD5 hash using echo
This is mostly for my own notes but this command will compute a md5 message digest from the command line. You can also replace md5sum with other checksum commands (e.g., sha1sum)

Use a decoy while scanning ports to avoid getting caught by the sys admin :9
Scan for open ports on the target device/computer (192.168.0.10) while setting up a decoy address (192.168.0.2). This will show the decoy ip address instead of your ip in targets security logs. Decoy address needs to be alive. Check the targets security log at /var/log/secure to make sure it worked.

show ls colors with demo
This can show all ls colors, with a demo.

Find files that have been modified on your system in the past 60 minutes
Useful mainly for debugging or troubleshooting an application or system, such as X11, Apache, Bind, DHCP and others. Another useful switch that can be combined with -mmin, -mtime and so forth is -daystart. For example, to find files that were modified in the /etc directory only yesterday: $ sudo find /etc -daystart -mtime 1 -type f

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


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: