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

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage
ps returns all running processes which are then sorted by the 4th field in numerical order and the top 10 are sent to STDOUT.

quickly formats a fat partition. usefull for flash drives

A simple way to securely use passwords on the command line or in scripts
In this example, where the users gpg keyring has a password, the user will be interactively prompted for the keyring password. If the keyring has no password, same as above, sans the prompt. Suitable for cron jobs. ~/.gnupg/passwd/http-auth.gpg is the encrypted http auth password, for this particular wget use case. This approach has many use cases. example bash functions: function http_auth_pass() { gpg2 --decrypt ~/.gnupg/passwd/http-auth.gpg 2>/dev/null; } function decrypt_pass() { gpg2 --decrypt ~/.gnupg/passwd/"$1" 2>/dev/null; }

clear all non-ascii chars of file.txt

Make changes in .bashrc immediately available

Sort file greater than a specified size in human readeable format including their path and typed by color, running from current directory
1. find file greater than 10 MB 2. direct it to xargs 3. xargs pass them as argument to ls

Hear the mice moving
Beeps on mouse's every move. Bear in mind that, at least on Ubuntu, /dev/input/mice can be read only by root.

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"

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }


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: