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

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"

Add a line to a file using sudo
This is the solution to the common mistake made by sudo newbies, since $ sudo echo "foo bar" >> /path/to/some/file does NOT add to the file as root. Alternatively, $ sudo echo "foo bar" > /path/to/some/file should be replaced by $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee /path/to/some/file And you can add a >/dev/null in the end if you're not interested in the tee stdout : $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee -a /path/to/some/file >/dev/null

Vi - Matching Braces, Brackets, or Parentheses
This is a simple command for jumping to the matching brace, square bracket, or parentheses. For example, it can take you from the beginning of a function to the end with one key stroke. To delete everything between the pairs of {}, [], or (), issue the command: $ d% To replace text between pairs of braces, brackets, or parentheses, issue the command: $ c% You can also use this command to find out if an opening brace has been properly closed.

Merge some PDF files into a single one

Tell Analytics to fuck itself.
See http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html if you are unclear about the Google Analytics cookie system. If Firefox is your daily browser, be a good Orwellian and run this command regularly. If you see, 'SQL error near line 1: database is locked', close Firefox and run again.

extract plain text from MS Word docx files
Tested on MacOS X

Wait for an already launched program to stop before starting a new command.
Referring to the original post, if you are using $! then that means the process is a child of the current shell, so you can just use `wait $!`. If you are trying to wait for a process created outside of the current shell, then the loop on `kill -0 $PID` is good; although, you can't get the exit status of the process.

Archive all SVN repositories in platform indepenent form
Use of hotcopy for safety/stability of the backups.

Monitoring file handles used by a particular process
-r : repeat mode

Show the command line for a PID, converting nulls to spaces and a newline
If you cat the file, all the parts of the command line are bunched up. If you use tr to convert the nulls to spaces, you're still left without a newline unless you add another step. This command does everything for you.


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: