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

Figure out what shell you're running

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"

Get Cisco network information
This gives you lots of nifty Cisco network information like VLAN tag, port and switch information.

Sum file sizes

Set file access control lists
The file myfile is owned by tom and has read and write permissions for tom. Group and other permissions are empty which make myfile readable and writable only by tom. setfacl enables user tom to give read permission to user john only. The command 'ls -l' shows a '+' sign telling us that file access control list has been setup for myfile.

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Create an alias, store it in ~/.bash_aliases and source your new alias into the ~/.bashrc
This is useful if you use a shell with a lot of other users. You will be able to run "topu" to see your running processes instead of the complete 'top -u username'. Read more on alias: http://man.cx/alias

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

live ssh network throughput test
connects to host via ssh and displays the live transfer speed, directing all transferred data to /dev/null needs pv installed Debian: 'apt-get install pv' Fedora: 'yum install pv' (may need the 'extras' repository enabled)

Change Title of Terminal Window to Verbose Info useful at Login
I usually have 5 or more ssh connections to various servers, and putting this command in my .bash_profile file makes my putty window or x terminal window title change to this easily recognizable and descriptive text. Includes the username, group, server hostname, where I am connecting from (for SSH tunneling), which device pts, current server load, and how many processes are running. You can also use this for your PROMPT_COMMAND variable, which updates the window title to the current values each time you exec a command. I prefix running this in my .bash_profile with $ [[ ! -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] && which makes sure it only does this when connecting via SSH with a TTY. Here's some rougher examples from http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html $ # If set, the value is executed as a command prior to issuing each primary prompt. $ #H=$((hostname || uname -n) 2>/dev/null | sed 1q);W=$(whoami) $ #export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${W}@${H}:${PWD/#$HOME/~} ${SSH_TTY/\/dev\//} [`uptime|sed -e "s/.*: \([^,]*\).*/\1/" -e "s/ //g"`]\007"' $ #PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;`id -un`:`id -gn`@`hostname||uname -n 2>/dev/null|sed 1q` `command who -m|sed -e "s%^.* \(pts/[0-9]*\).*(\(.*\))%[\1] (\2)%g"` [`uptime|sed -e "s/.*: \([^,]*\).*/\1/" -e "s/ //g"` / `command ps aux|wc -l`]\007"' $ #[[ -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] || export PROMPT_COMMAND $ #[[ -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] && [[ -f /dev/stdout ]] && SSH_TTY=/dev/stdout And here's a simple function example for setting the title: $ function set_window_title(){ echo -e "\033]0; ${1:-$USER@$HOST - $SHLVL} \007"; }


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: