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

Access to specific man page section
You can view the man pages from section five by passing the section number as an argument to the man command

View ~/.ssh/known_hosts key information
Will return the SSH server key information for each host you have in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file, including key size, key fingerprint, key IP address or domain name, and key type.

Put the machine to sleep after the download(wget) is done
[Note: This command needs to be run as root]. If you are downloading something large at night, you can start wget as a normal user and issue the above command as root. When the download is done, the computer will automatically go to sleep. If at any time you feel the computer should not go to sleep automatically(like if you find the download still continuing in the morning), just create an empty file called nosleep in /tmp directory.

Generate a random password 30 characters long

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Shows space used by each directory of the root filesystem excluding mountpoints/external filesystems (and sort the output)

Find files with the same names in several directories.
cat file1 file2 file3|sort|uniq -d finds the same lines in several files, especially in files with lists of files.

Check your unread Gmail from the command line
Checks the Gmail ATOM feed for your account, parses it and outputs a list of unread messages. For some reason sed gets stuck on OS X, so here's a Perl version for the Mac: $ curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '' '{for (i=2; i

Extract multiple tar files at once in zsh
tar doesn't support wildcard for unpacking (so you can't use tar -xf *.tar) and it's shorter and simpler than for i in *.tar;do tar -xf $i;done (or even 'for i in *.tar;tar -xf $i' in case of zsh) -i says tar not to stop after first file (EOF)

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


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: