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

Simulate typing but with mistakes
The output will show jerk, then wonderful person since echo parses the \b character.

delete a particular line by line number in file
deletes line 3 in known_hosts text file

Create an alias, store it in ~/.bash_aliases and source your new alias into the ~/.bashrc
This is useful if you use a shell with a lot of other users. You will be able to run "topu" to see your running processes instead of the complete 'top -u username'. Read more on alias: http://man.cx/alias

Query an NFS host for its list of exports

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command

Recursively remove all files in a CVS directory
This will search all directories and ignore the CVS ones. Then it will search all files in the resulting directories and act on them.

Shows size of dirs and files, hidden or not, sorted.
Enhanced version: fixes sorting by human readable numbers, and filters out non MB or GB entries that have a G or an M in their name.

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"

Find the package that installed a command


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: