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

List alive hosts in specific subnet
Works on any machine with nmap installed. Previous version does not work on machines without "seq". Also works on subnets of any size.

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command
Allows you to edit your command using your chosen editor. Works in bash with "set -o vi".

calculate md5 sums for every file in a directory tree
an alternative

Google text-to-speech in mp3 format
same but redirecting to player and putting whaever text line.. works on my ubuntu machine ...

Sort lines using the Xth characted as the start of the sort string
Tells sort to ignore all characters before the Xth position in the first field per line. If you have a list of items one per line and want to ignore the first two characters for sorting purposes, you would type "sort -k1.3". Change the "1" to change the field being sorted. The decimal value is the offset in the specified field to sort by.

Paste OS X clipboard contents to a file on a remote machine
Redirects the contents of your clipboard through a pipe, to a remote machine via SSH.

Watch several log files of different machines in a single multitail window on your own machine
this way you have the multitail with all its options running on your own machine with the tails of the two remote machines inside :)

ls -hog --> a more compact ls -l
I often deal with long file names and the 'ls -l' command leaves very little room for file names. An alternative is to use the -h -o and -g flags (or together, -hog). * The -h flag produces human-readable file size (e.g. 91K instead of 92728) * The -o suppresses the owner column * The -g suppresses the group column Since I use to alias ll='ls -l', I now do alias ll='ls -hog'

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"

list files recursively by size


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: