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

Easy way to scroll up und down to change to one of n last visited directories.
This alias is meant to append n (here is n=10) most recently used cd commands to the bottom of history file. This way you can easily change to one of previous visited directories simply by hitting 1-10 times arrow up key. Hint: You can make more aliases implying the same rule for any set of frequently used long and complex commands like: mkisof, rdesktop, gpg...

Exclude inserting a table from a sql import
Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

Run remote web page, but don't save the results
I have a remote php file that I want to run once an hour. I set up cron to run this wget. I don't really care about what's in the file though, I don't want to save the results, so I run the -O and send it to /dev/null

whowatch: Linux and UNIX interactive, process and users monitoring tool
whowatch is a interactive, ncurses-based, process and users monitoring tool, which updates information in real time. This is a perfect tool for local and remote servers. It displays information about the users currently logged on to the machine, in real-time. Besides standard information (login name, tty, host, user's process), the type of the connection (ie. telnet or ssh) is shown. Display of users command line can be switch to tty idle time. Certain user can be selected and his processes tree may be viewed as well as tree of all system processes. Tree may be displayed with additional column that shows owner of each process. In the process tree mode SIGINT and SIGKILL signals can be sent to the selected process. Killing processes is just as simple and fun as deleting lines on the screen.

Print just line 4 from a textfile
Prints the 4th line and then quits. (Credit goes to flatcap in comments: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6031/print-just-line-4-from-a-textfile#comment.)

backup directory. (for bash)

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

BASH: Print shell variable into AWK

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

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"


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: