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

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

using tee to echo to a system file with sudo privileges
We sometimes need to change kernel parameters by echoing the file . This needs root privilege and if we do it using sudo like this , it fails $ sudo echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor -bash: /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor: Permission denied We can achieve this with the tee command by just doing sudo without logging as root user http://www.zaman4linux.in/2010/09/using-tee-to-echo-to-system-file-with.html

search for a file in PATH

Batch convert files to utf-8
taken from http://blog.ofirpicazo.com/linux/batch-convert-files-to-utf-8/

Diff XML files
Diffs two xml files by formatting them first using xmllint and then invoking diff. Usage: diffxml XMLFile1 XMLFile2

Print line immediately before a matching regex.
Use this if you don't have access to GNU grep's -B option.

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"

Display a wave pattern
Purely frivolous - print a sine/cosine curve to the console - the width varies as it progresses. Ctrl-C to halt.

Find the package that installed a command

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"


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: