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 out the active XOrg Server DISPLAY number (from outside)
It's useful when you cannot access your env (systemd) or the process DISPLAY variable is not set. Perhaps also when you have a multi-head/user configuration.

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

move you up one directory quickly
In bash, this turns on auto cd. If a command is just a directory name, it cd's into that directory.

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"

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Indent a one-liner.
I often write a one-liner which I want to use later in a script.

Listing directory content of a directory with a lot of entries
Ever wanted to get the directory content with 'ls' or 'find' and had to wait minutes until something was printed? Perl to the rescue. The one-liner above(redirected to a file) took less than five seconds to run in a directory with more man 2 million files. One can adapt it to e.g. delete files that match a certain pattern.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Compare an archive with filesystem
and you quickly know the files you changed

find which lines in a file are longer than N characters
Filter out lines of input that contain 72, or fewer, characters. This uses bash only. ${#i} is the number of characters in variable i.


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: