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

remove comments (even those starting with spaces), empty lines (even those containing spaces) in one grep command
useful for discarding even those comments which start with blanks or those empty lines which contain blanks

Console clock
Turn your terminal into digital clock.

list files recursively by size

Monitor system load and print out top offending processes
This checks the system load every second and if it's over a certain threshold (.8 in this example), it spits out the date, system loads and top 4 processes sorted by CPU. Additionally, the \a in the first echo creates an audible bell.

Cancel all aptitude scheduled actions
Very handy if you have done a package selection mistake in aptitude. Note that it's better to do a Ctrl+U (undo) in aptitude if possible, because the keep-all will clear some package states (like the 'hold' state).

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"

Log colorizer for OSX (ccze alternative)
Download colorizer by @raszi @ http://github.com/raszi/colorize

Check if a command is available in your system
Usefull to detect if a commad that your script relies upon is properly installed in your box, you can use it as a function function is_program_installed() { type "$1" >/dev/null } Invoke it and check the execution code is_program_installed "dialog" if [ ! $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "dialog is not installed" exit 1 fi

shell function which allows you to tag files by creating symbolic links directories in a 'tags' folder.
The tag function takes a tag name as its first argument, then a list of files which take that tag. The directory $HOME/tags/tagname will then hold symbolic links to each of the tagged files. This function was inspired by tmsu (found at https://bitbucket.org/oniony/tmsu/wiki/Home). Example: $ tag dog airedale.txt .shizturc weimeraner.pl This will create $HOME/tags/dog which contains symbolic links to airedale.txt .shizturc and weimeraner.pl

List only directories, one per line


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: