All commands (14,184)

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

dump database from postgresql to a file

Figure out what shell you're running

Test load balancers
With the "--resolve" switch, you can avoid doing DNS lookups or edit the /etc/hosts file, by providing the IP address for a domain directly. Useful if you have many servers with different IP addresses behind a load balancer. Of course, you would loop it: $ for IP in 10.11.0.{1..10}; do curl --resolve subdomain.example.com:80:$IP subdomain.example.com -I -s; done

Create a bunch of dummy text files
Using the 'time' command, running this with 'tr' took 28 seconds (and change) each time but using base64 only took 8 seconds (and change). If the file doesn't have to be viewable, pulling straight from urandom with head only took 6 seconds (and change)

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"

Take a screenshot of the focused window with a 4 second countdown
Take a screenshot of the focused window with a 4 second countdown # shorten by adding to your .bashrc: alias sss='scrot -ucd4 && eog $(ls -tr | tail -n1)' $ echo -e "\nalias sss='scrot -ucd4 && eog $(ls -tr | tail -n1)'" >> ~/.bashrc -d 4 second delay -c display countdown -u focused window man scrot for more flags

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Tail a log-file over the network
This one is tried and tested for Ubuntu 12.04. Works great for tailing any file over http.

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

rename / move Uppercase filenames to lowercase filenames current directory
move filename/rename filenames with Uppercase to lowercase in current directory


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: