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

Source zshrc/bashrc in all open terminals
Put this in your zshrc, source it, then run 'pkill -usr1 zsh' to source it in all open terminals. Also works with bash. More info: http://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/12g76v/how_to_automatically_source_zshrc_in_all_open/

Compare a remote dir with a local dir
You can compare directories on two different remote hosts as well: $ diff -y

Query Wikipedia via console over DNS
Query Wikipedia by issuing a DNS query for a TXT record. The TXT record will also include a short URL to the complete corresponding Wikipedia entry.You can also write a little shell script like: $ $ cat wikisole.sh $ #!/bin/sh $ dig +short txt ${1}.wp.dg.cx and run it like $ ./wikisole.sh unix were your first option ($1) will be used as search term.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

CLI Visual Apache Web Log Analyzer
GoAccess is an open source real-time Apache web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems. It provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual server report on the fly. http://goaccess.prosoftcorp.com/

find previously entered commands (requires configuring .inputrc)
[Click the "show sample output" link to see how to use this keystroke.]   Meta-p is one of my all time most used and most loved features of working at the command line. It's also one that surprisingly few people know about. To use it with bash (actually in any readline application), you'll need to add a couple lines to your .inputrc then have bash reread the .inputrc using the bind command:   $ echo '"\en": history-search-forward' >> ~/.inputrc   $ echo '"\ep": history-search-backward' >> ~/.inputrc   $ bind -f ~/.inputrc     I first learned about this feature in tcsh. When I switched over to bash about fifteen years ago, I had assumed I'd prefer ^R to search in reverse. Intuitively ^R seemed better since you could search for an argument instead of a command. I think that, like using a microkernel for the Hurd, it sounded so obviously right fifteen years ago, but that was only because the older way had benefits we hadn't known about.     I think many of you who use the command line as much as I do know that we can just be thinking about what results we want and our fingers will start typing the commands needed. I assume it's some sort of parallel processing going on with the linguistic part of the brain. Unfortunately, that parallelism doesn't seem to work (at least for me) with searching the history. I realize I can save myself typing using the history shortly after my fingers have already started "speaking". But, when I hit ^R in Bash, everything I've already typed gets ignored and I have to stop and think again about what I was doing. It's a small bump in the road but it can be annoying, especially for long-time command line users. Usually M-p is exactly what I need to save myself time and trouble.     If you use the command line a lot, please give Meta-p a try. You may be surprised how it frees your brain to process more smoothly in parallel. (Or maybe it won't. Post here and let me know either way. ☺)

Get your external IP address with a random commandlinefu.com command
There's been so many ways submitted to get your external IP address that I decided we all need a command that will just go pick a random one from the list and run it. This gets a list of "Get your external IP" commands from commanlinefu.com and selects a random one to run. It will run the command and print out which command it used. This is not a serious entry, but it was a learning exercise for me writing it. My personal favourite is "curl icanhazip.com". I really don't think we need any other ways to do this, but if more come you can make use of them with this command ;o). Here's a more useful command that always gets the top voted "External IP" command, but it's not so much fun: $ eval $(curl -s http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/external/ZXh0ZXJuYWw=/sort-by-votes/plaintext|sed -n '/^# Get your external IP address$/{n;p;q}')

Add Password Protection to a file your editing in vim.
While I love gpg and truecrypt there's some times when you just want to edit a file and not worry about keys or having to deal needing extra software on hand. Thus, you can use vim's encrypted file format. For more info on vim's encrypted files visit: http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/editing.html#encryption

Graphically show percent of mount space used
Automatically drops mount points that have non-numeric sizes (e.g. /proc). Tested in bash on Linux and AIX.


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: