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

continuously print string as if being entered from the keyboard
Cycles continuously through a string printing each character with a random delay less than 1 second. First parameter is min, 2nd is max. Example: 1 3 means sleep random .1 to .3. Experiment with different values. The 3rd parameter is the string. The sleep will help with battery life/power consumption. $ cycle 1 3 $(openssl rand 100 | xxd -p) Fans of "The Shining" might get a kick out of this: $ cycle 1 4 ' All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.'

Count the number of queries to a MySQL server

Quick and Temporary Named Commands
* Add comment with # in your command * Later you can search that command on that comment with CTRL+R In the title command, you could search it later by invoking the command search tool by first typing CTRL+R and then typing "revert"

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Poor's man Matrix script
This creates a matrix of letters that run forever until you hit Ctrl-C simulating "The Matrix" effect... just for fun :) You may want to try the -n and -y switch to change the "FX" LOL! e.g.: pwgen -ny 3

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"

Get all IPs via ifconfig
The initial version of this command also outputted extra empty lines, so it went like this: 192.168.166.48 127.0.0.1 This happened on Ubuntu, i haven't tested on anything else.

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"

Display list of available printers

An alarm clock using xmms2 and at
I like the order of the arguments better this way.


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: