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

Prevent shell autologout
Unset TMOUT or set it to 0 in order to prevent shell autologout. TMOUT is the number of seconds after which the present shell will be killed if it has been idle for that long.

Runs previous command replacing foo by bar every time that foo appears
Very useful for rerunning a long command changing some arguments globally. As opposed to ^foo^bar, which only replaces the first occurrence of foo, this one changes every occurrence.

sleep for 1/10s or 1/100s or even 1/1000000s
sleep in microseconds instead of seconds Alternatively to usleep, which is not defined in POSIX 2008 (though it was defined up to POSIX 2004, and it is evidently available on Linux and other platforms with a history of POSIX compliance), the POSIX 2008 standard defines nanosleep

Find the package that installed a command

Show Apt/Dpkg configuration
Shows all configurations to apt and dpkg, rarely changed, you probably still have the default configuration. Go ahead and explore your configuration if you dare, perhaps change your apt-cache directory, Dir::Cache "var/cache/apt/"; or the names of the log files.

Copy without overwriting

Show all programs on UDP and TCP ports with timer information
-p PID and name of the program -u on a UDP port. -t also TCP ports -o networking timer -n numeric IP addresses (don't resolve them) -a all sockets

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

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

Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word passphrase (fast)
This restricts things 3 ways: 1. No capitalized words, hence no proper names. 2. No apostrophes. 3. Restricts size to range (3,7)


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: