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

Kill multiple instances of a running process

Print entire field if string is detected in column
It searches for a specific value in the specified column and if it finds it it'll print the whole field/row. Similarly, if you don't know what you're looking for exactly but want to exclude something you're already aware of, you can exclude that "something: awk '{ if ($column != "string") print $0}'

get all Amazon cloud (amazonws etc) ipv4 subnets

Mac OS X - List all of my machine's IP addresses
On the Mac, the format ifconfig puts out is little different from Linux: the IP address is space separated, instead of colon. That makes parsing the IP address easier. See releated command for Linux/Unix: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/651/getting-the-ip-address-of-eth0

Remove all files except list

drop first column of output by piping to this

Display a block of text with AWK
I find this terribly useful for grepping through a file, looking for just a block of text. There's "grep -A # pattern file.txt" to see a specific number of lines following your pattern, but what if you want to see the whole block? Say, the output of "dmidecode" (as root): $ dmidecode | awk '/Battery/,/^$/' Will show me everything following the battery block up to the next block of text. Again, I find this extremely useful when I want to see whole blocks of text based on a pattern, and I don't care to see the rest of the data in output. This could be used against the '/etc/securetty/user' file on Unix to find the block of a specific user. It could be used against VirtualHosts or Directories on Apache to find specific definitions. The scenarios go on for any text formatted in a block fashion. Very handy.

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"

list folders containing less than 2 MB of data
This command will search all subfolders of the current directory and list the names of the folders which contain less than 2 MB of data. I use it to clean up my mp3 archive and to delete the found folders pipe the output to a textfile & run: $ while read -r line; do rm -Rv "$line"; done < textfile

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy


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: