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

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

Monitor logs in Linux using Tail
Works in Ubuntu, I hope it will work on all Linux machines. For Unixes, tail should be capable of handling more than one file with '-f' option. This command line simply take log files which are text files, and not ending with a number, and it will continuously monitor those files. Putting one alias in .profile will be more useful.

capture selected window
I think, this is a shorter one :)

Find 'foo' string inside files

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
Using xargs is better than: $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \; as the -exec switch uses a separate process for each remove. xargs splits the streamed files into more managable subsets so less processes are required.

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

List programs with open ports and connections
I prefer to use this and not the -n variety, so I get DNS-resolved hostnames. Nice when I'm trying to figure out who's got that port open.

Create a tar of directory structure only

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"

prevent accidents while using wildcards
alternative for "echo rm *.txt". Just doubletab the command you are willing to use and it will show you the affected files.


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: