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

Insert the last argument of the previous command
for example if you did a: $ ls -la /bin/ls then $ ls !$ is equivalent to doing a $ ls /bin/ls

list files recursively by size

Show all listening and established ports TCP and UDP together with the PID of the associated process
Easy to remenber. Fot TCP only use: netstat -plant

shell equivalent of a boss button
Nobody wants the boss to notice when you're slacking off. This will fill your shell with random data, parts of it highlighted. Note that 'highlight' is the Perl module App::highlight, not "a universal sourcecode to formatted text converter." You'll also need Term::ANSIColor.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Replace strings in text
-e is the script function, it performs search and replace like vi, and -i is the edit the file in place.

set desktop background to highest-rated image from Reddit /r/wallpapers
You'll need "feh" to set the background from the commandline. Install with "apt-get install feh" Thanks to the Redditors on this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bira4/is_there_a_linux_version_of_this_preferably_a/

Pipe text from shell to windows cut and paste buffer using PuTTY and XMing.
Set up X forwarding in PuTTY, with X display location set to :0.0 Launch PuTTY ssh session. Launch Xming. Make sure that display is set to :0.0 (this is default). $ echo "I'm going to paste this into WINDERS XP" | xsel -i will insert the string into the windows cut and paste buffer. Thanks to Dennis Williamson at stackoverflow.com for sharing...

Remove a line from a file using sed (useful for updating known SSH server keys when they change)
For example, to remove line 5 from foo, type: vi +5d +wq foo

List the binaries installed by a Debian package
This shell function displays a list of binaries contained in an installed package; works on Debian based Linux distributions.


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: