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

watch iptables counters
Watch the number of packets/bytes coming through the firewall. Useful in setting up new iptables rules or chains. Use this output to reorder rules for efficiency.

Auto-log commands
A quick alias I use right before logging into a server so that I have a log of the transactions as well as the ability to re-connect from another computer. Useful for when your boss says "what commands did you run again on that server?" and you had already closed the terminal ;) I wrapped it in a script now, with more features, but this is the heart of it. Never leave home without it.

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

Multi-segment file downloading with lftp
This is for files only, for directories 'mirror' has to be used.

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"

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

Find status of all symlinks
The symlinks command can show status of all symbolic links, including which links are dangling, which symlinks point to files on other file systems, which symlinks use ../ more than necessary, which symlinks are messy (e.g. having too many slashes or dots), etc. Other useful things it can do include removing all dangling links (-d) and converting absolute links to relative links (-c). The path given must be an absolute path (which is why I used $(pwd) in the example command).

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"

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

ls not pattern
Hides some entries from listing.


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: