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

Make sure your script runs with a minimum Bash version
If you use new features of a certain Bash version in your shell script, make sure that it actually runs with the required version.

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"

Switch 2 characters on a command line.
If you typed 'sl', put the cursor on the 'l' and hit ctrl-t to get 'ls'.

cat a bunch of small files with file indication
If you have a bunch of small files that you want to cat to read, you can cat each alone (boring); do a cat *, and you won't see what line is for what file, or do a grep . *. "." will match any string and grep in multifile mode will place a $filename: before each matched line. It works recursively too!!

Print all /etc/passwd lines with duplicated uid
Prints all the lines in /etc/passwd belonging to users with a duplicated uid. It also adds the hostname to the beginning of the line. It's been tested in AIX, Solaris and Linux.

Rsync files with spaces
Using the double dash before the source and target makes the command work fine with weird filenames.

Download all music files off of a website using wget
This will download all files of the type specified after "-A" from a website. Here is a breakdown of the options: -r turns on recursion and downloads all links on page -l1 goes only one level of links into the page(this is really important when using -r) -H spans domains meaning it will download links to sites that don't have the same domain -nd means put all the downloads in the current directory instead of making all the directories in the path -A mp3 filters to only download links that are mp3s(this can be a comma separated list of different file formats to search for multiple types) -e robots=off just means to ignore the robots.txt file which stops programs like wget from crashing the site... sorry http://example/url lol..

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"

Count TCP States From Netstat
Counts TCP states from Netstat and displays in an ordered list.

ping a host until it responds, then play a sound, then exit
This allows for sleeping in between pings. Also, espeak needs to be installed.


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: