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 external IP address ( 10 characters long )
Shortest url to a external IP-service, 10 characters.

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

Triple monitoring in screen
This command starts screen with 'htop', 'nethogs' and 'iotop' in split-screen. You have to have these three commands (of course) and specify the interface for nethogs - mine is wlan0, I could have acquired the interface from the default route extending the command but this way is simpler. htop is a wonderful top replacement with many interactive commands and configuration options. nethogs is a program which tells which processes are using the most bandwidth. iotop tells which processes are using the most I/O. The command creates a temporary "screenrc" file which it uses for doing the triple-monitoring. You can see several examples of screenrc files here: http://www.softpanorama.org/Utilities/Screen/screenrc_examples.shtml

Reinstall Grub

Terminate a frozen SSH-session
A key sequence for terminating a frozen session. Full sequence on a swedish keyboard: [ENTER] [ALTGR] tilde [SPACE] dot

Clean up poorly named TV shows.
Replace 'SHOWNAME' with the name of the TV show. Add -n to test the command without renaming files. Check the 'sample output'.

Command to rename multiple file in one go
An entirely shell-based solution (should work on any bourne-style shell), more portable on relying on the rename command, the exact nature of which varies from distro to distro.

Decrypt passwords from Google Chrome and Chromium.
Read this before you down voting and comment that it is not working -> Wont work on latest versions ~75> since database file is locked and has to be decrypted. This is useful if you have an old hdd with a chrome installation and want to decrypt your old passwords fast.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

grep for tabs without using Ctrl-V trick
-P tells grep to use perl regex matches (only works on the GNU grep as far as I know.)


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: