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

Make changes in .bashrc immediately available
You may want to just use the shortcut "." instead of "source"

Random line from bash.org (funny IRC quotes)
bash.org is a collection of funny quotes from IRC. WARNING: some of the quotes contain "adult" jokes... may be embarrassing if your boss sees them... Thanks to Chen for the idea and initial version! This script downloads a page with random quotes, filters the html to retrieve just one liners quotes and outputs the first one. Just barely under the required 255 chars :) Improvment: You can replace the head -1 at the end by: $awk 'length($0)>0 {printf( $0 "\n%%\n" )}' > bash_quotes.txt which will separate the quotes with a "%" and place it in the file. and then: $strfile bash_quotes.txt which will make the file ready for the fortune command and then you can: $fortune bash_quotes.txt which will give you a random quote from those in the downloaded file. I download a file periodically and then use the fortune in .bashrc so I see a funny quote every time I open a terminal.

Fire CMD every time FILE (or directory) is updated (on *BSD)

Show the 20 most CPU/Memory hungry processes
This command will show the 20 processes using the most CPU time (hungriest at the bottom). You can see the 20 most memory intensive processes (hungriest at the bottom) by running: $ ps aux | sort +3n | tail -20 Or, run both: $ echo "CPU:" && ps aux | sort +2n | tail -20 && echo "Memory:" && ps aux | sort +3n | tail -20

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"

Remove all .svn folders

Google Translate
$translate works from command line

ncdu - ncurses disk usage
ncdu is a text-mode ncurses-based disk usage analyzer. Useful for when you want to see where all your space is going. For a single flat directory it isn't more elaborate than an du|sort or some such thing, but this analyzes all directories below the one you specify so space consumed by files inside subdirectories is taken into account. This way you get the full picture. Features: file deletion, file size or size on disk and refresh as contents change. Homepage: http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

Find and remove core files

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.


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: