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

Google Spell Checker
I took matthewbauer's cool one-liner and rewrote it as a shell function that returns all the suggestions or outputs "OK" if it doesn't find anything wrong. It should work on ksh, zsh, and bash. Users that don't have tee can leave that part off like this: $spellcheck(){ typeset y=$@;curl -sd "$y" https://google.com/tbproxy/spell|sed -n '/s="[1-9]"/{s/]*>/ /g;s/\t/ /g;s/ *\(.*\)/Suggestions: \1\n/g;p}';}

Beep siren
Infinitely plays beeps with sinusoidally changing sound frequency. Ideal for alarm on an event.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Go to the previous sibling directory in alphabetical order
Based on linkinpark342 suggestion. Sometimes you have to browse your way through a lot of sub-directories. This command cd to the previous sub-directory in alphabetical order. For example, if you have the directories "lectures/01-intro", "lectures/02-basic", "lectures/03-advanced" and so on, and your PWD is "02-basic", it jumps to "01-intro".

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"

View all date formats, Quick Reference Help Alias
If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command. # creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com $ ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/`date +git-$USER@$HOSTNAME-%m-%d-%g` -C 'webmaster@askapache.com' $ # /home/gpl/.ssh/git-gplnet@askapache.github.com-04-22-10 # create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory $ tar -czf $(date +$HOME/.backups/%m-%d-%g-%R-`sed -u 's/\//#/g'

Bash logger

check open ports without netstat or lsof

List files with quotes around each filename

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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: