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"

Ctrl+S Ctrl+Q terminal output lock and unlock
These are simple shortcuts to pause and continue terminal output, works in most terminals and screen multiplexers like screen. You can use it to catch something if things change too fast, and scroll with Shift + PgUp PgDown. On linux console ScrollLock can also be used.

Install a LAMP server in a Debian based distribution
The execution of this command will install a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) in a Debian based distribution. For example, in Ubuntu.

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"

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"

Find how much of your life you've wasted coding in the current directory
Finds all C++, Python, SWIG files in your present directory (uses "*" rather than "." to exclude invisibles) and counts how many lines are in them. Returns only the last line (the total).

Archive all folders in a directory into their own tar.bz2 file
Remove the "echo" to actually archive. Many similar commands are found on commandlinefu but I end up needing this very specific one from time to time. To extract any of them, use the standard tar.bz2 extract command: $tar xvjf folder1.tar.bz2

list files recursively by size

Get own public IP address
Plain Text Ip Output, independent of Layout change.

Toggle between directories
switch to previous directory or toggle


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: