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

Safe Delete
remove file that has sensitive info safely. Overwrites it 33 times with zeros

Show top 50 running processes ordered by highest memory/cpu usage refreshing every 1s
http://alvinalexander.com/linux/unix-linux-process-memory-sort-ps-command-cpu for an overview of --sort available values

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"

Enable ** to expand files recursively (>=bash-4.0)
Since bash 4.0, you can use ** to recursively expand to all files in the current directory. This behaviour is disabled by default, this command enables it (you'd best put it in your .profile). See the sample output for clarification. In my opinion this is much better than creating hacks with find and xargs when you want to pass files to an application.

List last opened tabs in firefox browser

Go up multiple levels of directories quickly and easily.
This is a kind of wrapper around the shell builtin cd that allows a person to quickly go up several directories. Instead of typing: cd ../.. A user can type: cd ... Instead of: cd ../../.. Type: cd .... Add another period and it goes up four levels. Adding more periods will take you up more levels.

Content search.
Grep will read the contents of each file in PWD and will use the REs $1 $2 ... $n to match the contents. In case of match, grep will print the appropriate file, line number and the matching line. It's just easier to write $ ff word1 word2 word3 Instead of $ grep -rinE 'word1|word2|word3' .

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Binary injection
Replace (as opposed to insert) hex opcodes, data, breakpoints, etc. without opening a hex editor. HEXBYTES contains the hex you want to inject in ascii form (e.g. 31c0) OFFSET is the hex offset (e.g. 49cf) into the binary FILE

Convert ascii string to hex
Converts the ascii text to hex from bash. Check the sample output.


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: