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

Terminal Keyboard Shortcut list
This command will give you a list of available keyboard shortcuts according to stty.

Read and write to TCP or UDP sockets with common bash tools
Ever needed to test firewalls but didn't have netcat, telnet or even FTP? Enter /dev/tcp, your new best friend. /dev/tcp/(hostname)/(port) is a bash builtin that bash can use to open connections to TCP and UDP ports. This one-liner opens a connection on a port to a server and lets you read and write to it from the terminal. How it works: First, exec sets up a redirect for /dev/tcp/$server/$port to file descriptor 5. Then, as per some excellent feedback from @flatcap, we launch a redirect from file descriptor 5 to STDOUT and send that to the background (which is what causes the PID to be printed when the commands are run), and then redirect STDIN to file descriptor 5 with the second cat. Finally, when the second cat dies (the connection is closed), we clean up the file descriptor with 'exec 5>&-'. It can be used to test FTP, HTTP, NTP, or can connect to netcat listening on a port (makes for a simple chat client!) Replace /tcp/ with /udp/ to use UDP instead.

Scan for new SCSI devices
Issues a scan command on the given scsi host adapter (ex. a fibre channel adapter, in the example above on host0). Output can be watched in the messages log or in "dmesg"

diff two svn repos ignoring spaces,tabs and svnfiles

run complex remote shell cmds over ssh, without escaping quotes
It executes commands as arguments to ssh, avoiding problematic shell expansions, without the need of writing the commands in question to a temporary file, just reading them from STDIN.

delay: a simple scheduler
the "delay" utility is an invaluable tool for me. with gnu-screen it allows you to schedule something and have it run and output to the current terminal, unlike "at". You can also use it like "sleep" with seconds and also with date: delay until 13:33 friday && echo test get it from: http://onegeek.org/~tom/software/delay/current/delay.c (author: Tom Rothamel)

Get your outgoing IP address
should be very consistent cause it's google :-)

grep across a git repo and open matching files in gedit

Get your public ip using dyndns

Create a CD/DVD ISO image from disk.


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: