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

stop windows update
Windows only: stops windows update and the nagging restart window. You need your admin password for this one.

Substitute an already running command
eg: Already running cmd $sleep 120 Substitution cmd $c=$(pgrep sleep) && sleep 5 && kill $c

Learn the difference between single and double quotes

python smtp server
This command will start a simple SMTP server listening on port 1025 of localhost. This server simply prints to standard output all email headers and the email body.

a fast way to repeat output a byte
I'm both a one-liner fan and a haskell learner

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@site.com "cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
You'll want to use this for passwordless logins. Same as ssh-copy-id, if you don't have it on your system.

Tar - Compress by excluding folders
If you give tar a list of filenames, it will not add the directories, so if you don't care about directory ownership or permissions, you can save some space. Tar will create directories as necessary when extracting. This command is limited by the maximum supported size of the argument list, so if you are trying to tar up the whole OS for instance, you may just get "Argument list too long".

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"

List the binaries installed by a Debian package
This shell function displays a list of binaries contained in an installed package; works on Debian based Linux distributions.

Check if filesystem hangs
When a fs hangs and you've just one console, even # ls could be a dangerous command. Simply put a trailing "&" and play safe


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: