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

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

Random numbers with Ruby
There's been a few times I've needed to create random numbers. Although I've done so in PERL, I've found Ruby is actually faster. This script generates 20 random "10" digit number NOT A RANDOM NUMBER. Replace 20 (1..20) with the amount of random numbers you need generated

Twitpic upload and Tweet

Remove blank lines from a file using grep and save output to new file
The ^$ within the quotes is a regular expression: ^=beginning of line, $=end of line, with no characters between.

quick and dirty formatting for HTML code
Finds all the closing tags in a HTML document via non-greedy regex and adds a linefeed for easier reading/editing . sed -i.bak -r 's_(/[^>]*?>)_\1\n_g' filename.html . This will save a copy of filename.html as filename.html.bak and then add the linefeeds to the original file

move contents of the current directory to the parent directory, then remove current directory.
Robust means of moving all files up by a directory. Will handle dot files, filenames containing spaces, and filenames with almost any printable characters. Will not handle filenames containing a single-quote (but if you are moving those, it's time to go yell at whoever created them in the first place).

See n most used commands in your bash history
You can append these commands to the bottom of the history file to access them easier with the Up key: $ sort ~/.bash_history|uniq -c|sort -n|tail -n 10|tr -s " "|cut -d' ' -f3- >> ~/.bash_history

print all except first collumn

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"

Find default gateway


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: