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 a backup of the file.
It will create a backup of the filename. The advantage is that if you list the folder the backups will be sorted by date. The command works on any unix in bash.

Show Directories in the PATH Which does NOT Exist
I often need to know of my directory in the PATH, which one DOES NOT exist. This command answers that question * This command uses only bash's built-in commands * The parentheses spawn a new sub shell to prevent the modification of the IFS (input field separator) variable in the current shell

Poor's man Matrix script
This creates a matrix of letters that run forever until you hit Ctrl-C simulating "The Matrix" effect... just for fun :) You may want to try the -n and -y switch to change the "FX" LOL! e.g.: pwgen -ny 3

Remove duplicate entries in a file without sorting.
Using awk, find duplicates in a file without sorting, which reorders the contents. awk will not reorder them, and still find and remove duplicates which you can then redirect into another file.

Add a line from 1 file after every line of another (shuffle files together)
After every line in targetfile (empty lines included) insert in a line from addfile. "Save" results to savefile. Addfile should be longer than targetfile since this doesn't loop back to the top of addfile. /^/R addfile -- says for every line that matches "has a start of line" output a line from the file addfile. > savefile (optional) -- redirect output to savefile file.

Base conversions with bc
Easily convert numbers to their representations in different bases. Passing "ibase=16; obase=8; F2A" to bc will convert F2A (3882 in decimal) from Hex to Octal, and so on.

Make shell (script) low priority. Use for non interactive tasks

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"

simplest calculator

Trace and view network traffic
Trace and view network traffic. I made this far too complicated.. now fixed, thanks zolden.


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: