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

The command used by applications in OS X to determine whether a plist is "good". from Ed Marczak.
The check an entire folder is a one-liner: plutil -lint * | grep -v OK$ from Ed Marczak

Get current Xorg resolution via xrandr
Not sure if it works the same on any shell.

Monitor the queries being run by MySQL
Watch is a very useful command for periodically running another command - in this using mysqladmin to display the processlist. This is useful for monitoring which queries are causing your server to clog up. More info here: http://codeinthehole.com/archives/2-Monitoring-MySQL-processes.html

Creates PodFeeds.txt, a file that lists the URLs of rhythmbox podcasts from the rhythmdb.xml file.
The first grep any line with pod-feed in it plus the following five lines. The second grep throws out any line not containing . sed removes the leading four spaces then and the trailing . Using a colon as sed's separating character avoids having to escape the /. Works ok with Mythbuntu 9.04 (used mostly as a three line bash script).

Extended man command
This microscript looks up a man page for each word possible, and if the correct page is not found, uses w3m and Google's "I'm feeling lucky" to output a first possible result. This script was made as a result of an idea on a popular Linux forum, where users often send other people to RTFM by saying something like "man backup" or "man ubuntu one". To make this script replace the usual man command, save it as ".man.sh" in your home folder and add the following string to the end of your .bashrc file: alias man='~/.man.sh'

remove empty lines

Find dupe files by checking md5sum

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"

Check if you work on a virtual/physical machine in Linux
Command used to know if we are working on a virtual or physical machine. This command will use the dmidecode utility to retrieve hardware information of your computer via the BIOS. Run this command as root or with sudo.

Go to the Nth line of file [text editor]
This is not printing, real editing using the text editor.


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: