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

strip non-constant number of directories from tar archive while decompressing
If you want to decompress the files from an archive to current directory by stripping all directory paths, use --transform option to strip path information. Unfortunately, --strip-components option is good if the target files have same and constant depth of folders. The idea was taken from http://www.unix.com/solaris/145941-how-extract-files-tar-file-without-creating-directories.html

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"

Display the definition of a shell function
Display the code of a previously defined shell function.

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"

Fork Bomb for Windows
Quick and dirty forkbomb for all flavors of windows Do not use in production. Replace start with a command of your choice, this will just open a new command prompt and is pretty tricky to stop once started

Generate a binary file with all ones (0xff) in it
This is similar to how you would generate a file with all zeros $ dd if=/dev/zero of=allzeros bs=1024 count=2k

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Convert control codes to visible Unicode Control Pictures
Converts control codes and spaces (ASCII code ≤ 32) to visible Unicode Control Pictures, U+2400 ? U+2420. Skips \n characters, which is probably a good thing.

Find out what the day ends in
Several people have submitted commands to do this, but I think this is the simplest solution. It also happens to be the most portable one: It should work with any sh or csh derived shell under any UNIX-like OS. Oh by the way, with my German locale ($LC_TIME set appropriately) it prints "g" most of the time, and sometimes (on Wednesdays) it prints "h". It never prints "y".

Download a new release of a program that you already have very quickly
Zsync is an implementation of rsync over HTTP that allows updating of files from a remote Web server without requiring a full download. For example, if you already have a Debian alpha, beta or RC copy downloaded, zsync can just download the updated bits of the new release of the file from the server. This requires the distributor of the file to have created a zsync build control file (using zsyncmake).


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: