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

Create arbitrary big file full of zeroes but done in a second
If you want to create fast a very big file for testing purposes and you do not care about its content, then you can use this command to create a file of arbitrary size within less than a second. Content of file will be all zero bytes. The trick is that the content is just not written to the disk, instead the space for it is somehow reserved on operating system level and file system level. It would be filled when first accessed/written (not sure about the mechanism that lies below, but it makes the file creation super fast). Instead of '1G' as in the example, you could use other modifiers like 200K for kilobytes (1024 bytes), 500M for megabytes (1024 * 1024 bytes), 20G for Gigabytes (1024*1024*1024 bytes), 30T for Terabytes (1024^4 bytes). Also P for Penta, etc... Command tested under Linux.

Top 10 Memory Processes
It displays the top 10 processes sorted by memory usage

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" }

See KeepAlive counters on tcp connections
See connection's tcp timers

To get the CPU temperature continuously on the desktop
No need for a colon, and one less semicolon too. Also untested.

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"

Mac OS X - List all of my machine's IP addresses
On the Mac, the format ifconfig puts out is little different from Linux: the IP address is space separated, instead of colon. That makes parsing the IP address easier. See releated command for Linux/Unix: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/651/getting-the-ip-address-of-eth0

List all symbolic links in current directory
why go through the hard way? use find with -type l

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

repeat a command every one second
Short method of "while x=0; do foo ; sleep 1 ; done"


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: