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

Find out which debian package a command (executable) belongs to on debian-based distros
This revision to my command (command #8851) was called for when it failed to find the parent package of 'rlogin', which is really a deep symbolic link to /usr/bin/ssh. This revision fixes this newfound issue, while ensuring fixes of other older issues work too.

Numbers guessing game
Felt like I need to win the lottery, and wrote this command so I train and develop my guessing abilities.

Find broken symlinks in the current directory and its subdirectories.
This is best run as root to avoid permission denials that can produce false positives. Obviously you can specify a directory in the usual way: $ find -L dirname -type l I can't remember where I read about this or who deserves the credit for it. The find(1) manual page hints strongly toward it, however.

Convert the contents of a directory listing into a colon-separated environment variable
Useful for making a CLASSPATH out of a list of JAR files, for example. Also: export CLASSPATH=.:$(find ./lib -name '*.jar' -printf '%p:')

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"

Quickly build ulimit command from current values
It is helpful to know the current limits placed on your account, and using this shortcut is a quick way to figuring out which values to change for optimization or security. Alias is: $ alias ulimith="command ulimit -a|sed 's/^.*\([a-z]\))\(.*\)$/-\1\2/;s/^/ulimit /'|tr '\n' ' ';echo" Here's the result of this command: $ ulimit -c 0 -d unlimited -e 0 -f unlimited -i 155648 -l 32 -m unlimited -n 8192 -p 8 -q 819200 -r 0 -s 10240 -t unlimited -u unlimited -v unlimited -x unlimited $ ulimit -a core file size (blocks, -c) 0 data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited scheduling priority (-e) 0 file size (blocks, -f) unlimited pending signals (-i) 155648 max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 32 max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited open files (-n) 8192 pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8 POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200 real-time priority (-r) 0 stack size (kbytes, -s) 10240 cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited max user processes (-u) unlimited virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited file locks (-x) unlimited

OSX: Hear pronunciation of a word
I often use this command to learn pronunciation of unfamiliar words.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Indent all the files in a project using emacs
use -iname \*[.ch] instead of -iname \*.c -o -iname \*.h

Alias to edit and source your .bashrc file
Place the line above in your ~/.bahsrc file. Now every time you issue the 'vb' command, you invoke the vim editor to edit it, then source it so the changes take effect immediately. Notes: * This mechanism is not working well if your .bashrc contains commands that should not be sourced more than once. * This trick also work for your csh or tclsh users: place the following line in your ~/.cshrc file: alias vc 'vim ~/.cshrc; source ~/.cshrc Thank you adzap for pointing out the missing quote


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: