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

Convert seconds into minutes and seconds
This is a very simple way to input a large number of seconds and get a more useful value in minutes and seconds.

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

direct a single stream of input (ls) to multiple readers (grep & wc) without using temporary files

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"

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Search for in which package the specified file is included.

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

Decrypt passwords from Google Chrome and Chromium.
Read this before you down voting and comment that it is not working -> Wont work on latest versions ~75> since database file is locked and has to be decrypted. This is useful if you have an old hdd with a chrome installation and want to decrypt your old passwords fast.

list any Linux files without users or groups
suspicious/anomalous ownership may indicate system breach; should return no results

Limit bandwidth usage by any program
Trickle is a voluntary, cooperative bandwidth shaper. it works entirely in userland and is very easy to use. The most simple application is to limit the bandwidth usage of programs.


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: