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

Get a MySQL DB dump from a remote machine
This command will dump a database on a remote stream to stdout, compress it, stream it to your local machine, decompress it and put it into a file called database.sql.You could even pipe it into mysql on your local machine to restore it immediately. I had to use this recently because the server I needed a backup from didn't have enough disk space.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Extract a bash function
I often need to extract a function from a bash script and this command will do it.

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 date of last time a process was started in `date` format
STARTED Mon Oct 18 04:02:01 2010

List your installed Firefox extensions

Find jpeg images and copy them to a central location
Use if you have pictures all over the place and you want to copy them to a central location Synopsis: Find jpg files translate all file names to lowercase backup existing, don't overwrite, preserve mode ownership and timestamps copy to a central location

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Then end of the UNIX epoch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem Some other notable dates that have passed: $ date -d@1234567890 $ date -d@1000000000

Top 10 Memory Processes
It displays the top 10 processes sorted by memory usage


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: