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

Print a row of characters across the terminal
shorter than alternative

Get IPv4 of eth0 for use with scripts
I've been using it in a script to build from scratch proxy servers.

Create an SSH connection (reverse tunnel) through your firewall.
Allows you to establish a tunnel (encapsulate packets) to your (Server B) remote server IP from your local host (Server A). On Server B you can then connect to port 2001 which will forward all packets (encapsulated) to port 22 on Server A. -- www.fir3net.com --

convert a mp4 video file to mp3 audio file (multiple files)

move you up one directory quickly
In bash, this turns on auto cd. If a command is just a directory name, it cd's into that directory.

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"

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
Using -Z with grep and -0 with xargs handles file names with spaces and special characters.

Watch the progress of 'dd'
The 'dd' command doesn't provide a progress when writing data. So, sending the "USR1" signal to the process will spit out its progress as it writes data. This command is superior to others on the site, as it doesn't require you to previously know the PID of the dd command.

Print diagram of user/groups
Parses /etc/group to "dot" format and pases it to "display" (imagemagick) to show a usefull diagram of users and groups (don't show empty groups).

Search through files, ignoring .svn


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: