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

View disk usage

Check the age of the filesystem
Very useful set of commands to know when your file system was created.

Check if a remote port is up using dnstools.com (i.e. from behind a firewall/proxy)
Shell function; returns 0 if the port is up, 1 otherwise (check $? after executing). First parameter: IP address/hostname Second parameter: port number There is no error checking for the input parameters.

Create several copies of a file
Copy a file to a range of other files.

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"

yum -q list updates | tail -n+2

Sync the existing directory structure to destination, without transferring any files

power off system in X minutes
Replace 60 with the number of minutes until you want the machine to shut down. Alternatively give an absolute time in the format hh:mm (shutdown -h 9:30) Or shutdown right away (shutdown -h now)

Decode base64-encoded file in one line of Perl
If you are in an environment where you don't have the base64 executable or MIME tools available, this can be very handy for salvaging email attachments when the headers are mangled but the encoded document itself is intact.

Take a screenshot every 2 seconds
Take a screenshot every 2 seconds and save it as a png file


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: