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

give a binary the ability to open ports below 1024 as non root user
Binding a server to privileged port on Linux w/o running as root This is applicable to any service using privileged ports (< 1024), for instance to run a HTTP server on port 80 or a LDAP directory server on port 389 for example.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

uncomment the lines where the word DEBUG is found

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"

Find distro name and/or version/release
Works for most distributions, tested on Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Gentoo, SUSE, RedHat. Debian and Slackware: $cat /etc/*version

Create iso image of cd/dvd

ionice limits process I/O, to keep it from swamping the system (Linux)
This command is somewhat similar to 'nice', but constrains I/O usage rather than CPU usage. In particular, the '-c3' flag tells the OS to only allow the process to do I/O when nothing else is pending. This dramatically increases the responsiveness of the rest of the system if the process is doing heavy I/O. There's also a '-p' flag, to set the priority of an already-running process.

Report the established connections for a particular port

split a string (1)

Command for JOHN CONS
Would create a file with a meaningful title. Dedicated to John Cons, who is annoying us users. Merry Christmas!!!


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: