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

Compare two directory trees.
This uses Bash's "process substitution" feature to compare (using diff) the output of two different process pipelines.

Find the package that installed a command

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

list services running (as root)
A quick way to list services running

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

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"

Determine if a command is in your $PATH using POSIX
it is generally advised to avoid using which(1) whenever possible. which(1) is usually a csh(1) script, or sometimes a compiled binary. It's output is highly variable from operating system to operating system, so platform independent scripts could become quite complicated with the logic. On HP-UX 10.20, for example, it prints "no bash in /path /path /path ..."; on OpenBSD 4.1, it prints "bash: Command not found."; on Debian (3.1 through 5.0 at least) and SuSE, it prints nothing at all; on Red Hat 5.2, it prints "which: no bash in (/path:/path:...)"; on Red Hat 6.2, it writes the same message, but on standard error instead of standard output; and on Gentoo, it writes something on stderr. And given all these differences, it's still variable based on your shell. This is why POSIX is king. See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/081 for more ways on avoiding which(1).

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.

Outgoing IP of server
Faster than the curl/wget-approaches.

Print sensors data for your hardware


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: