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

processes per user counter
No need for sort

Say something out loud
Whatever arguments you pass will be spoken out loud. (Put it in a script or shell function.)

Go to parent directory of filename edited in last command

chroot, bind mount without root privilege/setup
PRoot is a user-space implementation of chroot, mount --bind, and binfmt_misc. This means that users don't need any privileges or setup to do things like using an arbitrary directory as the new root filesystem, making files accessible somewhere else in the filesystem hierarchy, or executing programs built for another CPU architecture transparently through QEMU user-mode. Also, developers can use PRoot as a generic Linux process instrumentation engine thanks to its extension mechanism, see CARE for an example. Technically PRoot relies on ptrace, an unprivileged system-call available in every Linux kernel. https://github.com/cedric-vincent/PRoot

Debug redirects between production reloads
Watches the headers of a curl, following any redirects and printing only the HTTP status and the location of the possible redirects.

tree by modify time with newest file at bottom
Go look at sample output first This is kind of like the ls command but displays by modify time with size, date and color. The newest files at the bottom of the screen (reverse using tac)

Null a file with sudo

convert single digit to double digits
each number in a file name gets expanded to the number of digets provided as arg_1 of the arguments in rjust_file_nums. Put the funciton in the .bashrc file. Be sure to $ source ~/.bashrc so that the function will be accessible from bash.

Instantly load bash history of one shell into another running shell
By default bash history of a shell is appended (appended on Ubuntu by default: Look for 'shopt -s histappend' in ~/.bashrc) to history file only after that shell exits. Although after having written to the history file, other running shells do *not* inherit that history - only newly launched shells do. This pair of commands alleviate that.

Lookup hostname for IP address


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: