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"

Make the "tree" command pretty and useful by default
I got really tired of having tree always show me tons of .svn and .git stuff that I don't care about. With this alias, "tree" uses pretty colors, snazzy line graphics, and ignores any source control and package mumbojumbo. (Customize the *.*.package glob, of course.)

search for a file in PATH

Count all the files in the directory and child directories

show the date every rpm was installed
the newest rpms are at the top; individual packages can also be queried this way: rpm --last -q package

Sort files in folders alphabetically
Creates one letter folders in the current directory and moves files with corresponding initial in the folder.

run command on a group of nodes in parallel

Create a tar archive with all files of a certain type found in present dir and subdirs
Note: the tar archive must not exist in order to create it. If exists it will only be updated and no already existent files in present search will still remain in the tar archive. The update option has to be used instead of create because the command tar may be executed more than once depending on the number of arguments that find throws. You can see maximum number of arguments with 'getconf ARG_MAX'

Syntax Highlight your Perl code
This uses Text::Highlight to output the specified Perl file with syntax highlighting. A better alternative is my App::perlhl - find it on the CPAN: http://p3rl.org/App::perlhl

Monitoring file handles used by a particular process
-r : repeat mode


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: