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

Shows cpu load in percent
Show the current load of the CPU as a percentage. Read the load from /proc/loadavg and convert it using sed: Strip everything after the first whitespace: $ sed -e 's/ .*//' Delete the decimal point: $ sed -e 's/\.//' Remove leading zeroes: $ sed -e 's/^0*//'

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Display unique values of a column
Find the unique values of a column utilizing awk. Credits goes to here (posted by "era"): http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/77138-awk-print-distinct-col-values.html

Convert (almost) any video file into webm format for online html5 streaming

Find the package that installed a command

for newbies, how to get one line info about all /bin programs
Get simple description on each file from /bin dir, in list form, usefull for newbies.

Getting started with tcpdump
At some point you want to know what packets are flowing on your network. Use tcpdump for this. The man page is obtuse, to say the least, so here are some simple commands to get you started. -n means show IP numbers and don't try to translate them to names. -l means write a line as soon as it is ready. -i eth0 means trace the packets flowing through the first ethernet interface. src or dst w.x.y.z traces only packets going to or from IP address w.x.y.z. port 80 traces only packets for HTTP. proto udp traces only packets for UDP protocol. Once you are happy with each option combine them with 'and' 'or' 'not' to get the effects you want.

Join lines and separate with spaces
Read vmargs.txt, which is a text file that could either be DOS-style (\r\n) or UNIX-style (\n) line endings and join the lines with a space separator. Can this be shortened/made more elegant?

Python version 3: Serve current directory tree at http://$HOSTNAME:8000/
In Python version 3, the module was merged into http.server. Gentlemen, change your aliases.

Trick find -exec option to execute alias
An alias cannot be executed as command in a find -exec line. This form will trick the command line and let you do the job.


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: