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"

A function to find the newest file in a directory
Works recusivley in the specified dir or '.' if none given. Repeatedly calls 'find' to find a newer file, when no newer files exist you have the newest. In this case 'newest' means most recently modified. To find the most recently created change -newer to -cnewer.

enumerate with padding
bash2 : for X in $(seq 1 5); do printf "%03g " "$X";done bash3 : for X in {1..5}; do printf "%03g " "$X";done bash4 : echo {001..5}

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"

Check reverse DNS
I'm just a simple programmer. I find dig too verbose. host tells me alias(es) and IP address in a quick to grok format with nothing special to remember for input parameters. With thanks to http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-test-or-check-reverse-dns/

remove comments (even those starting with spaces), empty lines (even those containing spaces) in one grep command
useful for discarding even those comments which start with blanks or those empty lines which contain blanks

Watch movies in your terminal
requires mplayer

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

change up n directories
Change n directories up, without parameters change one up

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions (no echo)
Write a file you edited in Vim but that you do not have the permissions to write to (unless you use sudo.) Same as #1204 but without the echo to stdout that I find annoying.


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: