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

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Belgian banking "structured communication"
Derived from current time down to minutes.

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

grab all commandlinefu shell functions into a single file, suitable for sourcing.
Much simpler but not as many features as the alternative.

Make the Mac OS X Dock 2D once more (10.5 and above only)
Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) introduced a new, 3D, reflective Dock. For those of us who prefer the Dock to be a little less distracting, this command is the answer. The Dock will be rendered in the same style as when pinned to the left- or right-hand side of the screen. Replace YES with NO to restore the 3D Dock.

Get the size of all the directories in current directory

Uniquely (sort of) color text so you can see changes
Colorify colors input by converting the text to a number and then performing modulo 7 on it. This resulting number is used as the color escape code. This can be used to color the results of commands with complex outputs (like "482279054165371") so if any of the digits change, there's a good chance the color will change too. I say good chance because there's only 7 unique colors here, so assuming you were watching random numbers, there would be a 6/7 chance that the color would change when the number changed. This should really only be used to help quickly identify when things change, but should not be the only thing relied upon to positively assert that an output has not changed.

Perl oneliner to print access rights in octal format
This prints file access rights in octal - useful when "stat" is unavailable.

List Threads by Pid along with Thread Start Time
This command will list all threads started by a particular pid along with the start time of each thread. This is very valuable when diagnosing thread leaks.

openssl Generate Self Signed SSL Certifcate
generating self signed ssl certificate to use in dovecot postfix nginx Self signed certificates can be used for private encryptions between server and client and must be manually accepted on browser/ client


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: