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

Find the package that installed a command

Terminal - Show directories in the PATH, one per line with sed and bash3.X `here string'
another method : awk '{gsub(/:/, "\n");print}'

Search replace with Ansible style timestamps
$ ls httpd.conf httpd.conf.2015-07-22@14:43:20

Replace multiple file extensions with a single extension
The above is just a prove of concept based around the nested bash substitution. This could be useful in situations where you're in a directory with many filetypes but you only want to convert a few. $ for f in *.bmp *.jpg *.tga; do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done or you can use ls | egrep to get more specific... but be warned, files with spaces will cause a ruckus with expansion but the bash for loop uses a space delimited list. $ for f in $(ls | egrep "bmp$|jpg$|tga$"); do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done I'm guessing some people will still prefer doing it the sed way but I thought the concept of this one was pretty neat. It will help me remember bash substitutions a little better :-P

Count threads of a jvm process
if you have problem threads problem in tomcat

Compare a remote file with a local file
This method does not transfer the contents of the entire file, instead it computes a md5 sum of the file on each end so that large files can be compared without transferring them across the net.

get the top 10 longest filenames

Use xdg-open to avoid hard coding browser commands
I rarely use the system menu to start applications. I use keyboard shortcuts instead. Keyboard shortcuts are convenient time savers. To configure the shortcuts I use gconf-editor or CompizConfig Settings Manager (if I have Compiz turned on). Lately I've been using Chromium as my browser. Since Chromium is under heavy development it occasionally becomes unusable and I have to switch back to Firefox. I was hard-coding the browser command in my keyboard shortcuts. This became problematic with frequent browser hopping. I now use the xdg-open command when defining my keyboard shortcuts. xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. In the metacity keybinging_commands I have xdg-open http://gmail.com where I used to have firefox http://gmail.com. Now when switching browsers I don't have to update each keyboard binding command I just change my default browser in Ubuntu by clicking through the menu: System / Preferences / Preferred Applications / Web Browser. xdg-open is more convenient for this browser hopper.

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"

recursively change file name from uppercase to lowercase (or viceversa)
easier way to recursively change files to lowercase using rename instead


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: