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

reset hosed terminal

pretend to be busy in office to enjoy a cup of coffee

Count the number of characters in each line

Count the frequency of every word for a given file
Counts the frequency of words in a file

Find the package that installed a command

list directories only

Watch for when your web server returns
If your web server is down, this command will periodically attempt to connect to it. If the output is blank, your server is not yet up. If you see HTML, your server is up. Obviously, you need to replace the Google URL with your web server URL... * 'watch' -- a command for re-executing a command and displaying the output * '-n 15' -- tells watch to redo the command every 15 seconds * 'curl' -- a handy utility for getting the source of a web page * '-s' -- tells curl to be silent about failing * '--connect-timeout 10' -- Try to connect for 10 seconds

gzip compression with progress bar and remaining time displayed

Watch the size of a directory using figlet
You can substitute /home/$USER with any path you like.

List all information about all files (in current dir)
This is a funny usage of the traditional command ls. It could be basically simplified as: $ ls -a -l Duplicating arguments is permitted: $ ls -a -l -l And this markup could be shortened as: $ ls -al Extra note: To view filesizes like a pro, pray for your God: $ ls -allah


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: