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

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"

Clear your history saved into .bash_history file!
Note the space before the command; that prevents your history eliminating command from being recorded. ' history -c && rm -f ~/.bash_history' Both steps are needed. 'history -c' clears what you see in the history command. 'rm -f ~/.bash_history' deletes the history file in your home directory.

Random unsigned integer
works at least in bash. returns integer in range 0-32767. range is not as good, but for lots of cases it's good enough.

zsh only: access a file when you don't know the path, if it is in PATH
Say you want to execute 'file' on the command 'top' (to determine what type of file it is); but you don't know where 'top' resides: preface the argument with = and zsh will implicitly prepend the path.

Efficient remote forensic disk acquisition gpg-crypted for multiple recipients
Acquires a bit-by-bit data image, gzip-compresses it on multiple cores (pigz) and encrypts the data for multiple recipients (gpg -e -r). It finally sends it off to a remote machine.

Sort a character string
Sorts a character string, using common shell commands.

Record audio and video from webcam using mencoder
Record audio to MP3 stream and video to MPEG-4 stream from webcam to AVI file using mencoder. Gives floating point exception in some mencoder versions.

Show all symlinks

See system users

Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net


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: