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

search google on os x
Searches Google, but requires no "", and will also search all terms input in the CL, eg: > google foo bar returns search URL "http://www.google.com/search?q=foo%20bar" You could also use awk to replace all spaces with a +, which is how the Google search handles spaces, but that makes it more than one line.

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"

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Batch convert files to utf-8
taken from http://blog.ofirpicazo.com/linux/batch-convert-files-to-utf-8/

Kill all processes belonging to a user
This is a 'killall' command equivalent where it is not available. Prior to executing it, set the environment variable USERNAME to the username, whose processes you want to kill or replace the username with the $USERNAME on the command above. Side effect: If any processes from other users, are running with a parameter of $USERNAME, they will be killed as well (assuming you are running this as root user) [-9] in square brackets at the end of the command is optional and strongly suggested to be your last resort. I do not like to use it as the killed process leaves a lot of mess behind.

Find the package that installed a command

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Sort file greater than a specified size in human readeable format including their path and typed by color, running from current directory
1. find file greater than 10 MB 2. direct it to xargs 3. xargs pass them as argument to ls

live netcat network throughput test
On the another machine write this command. pv -r /dev/zero | nc 192.168.1.1 7777 It will show live throughput between two machine.The destination machine ip is at our example 192.168.1.1 You must multiply by 8 for the network calculation. You must install pv and netcat commands for this commands usage. kerim@bayner.com http://www.bayner.com/

Display the standard deviation of a column of numbers with awk
This will calculate a running standard deviation in one pass and should never have the possibility for overflow that can happen with other implementations. I suppose there is a potential for underflow in the corner case where the deltas are small or the values themselves are small.


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: