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

Shell function to exit script with error in exit status and print optional message to stderr
USAGE: die ERRNUM [MESSAGE]

Redefine the cd command's behavior
Often, the very next command after the cd command is 'ls', so why not combine them?. Tested on a Red Hat derivative and Mac OS X Leopard Update: changed ${1:-$HOME} to "${@:-$HOME}" to accomodate directories with spaces in the names

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"

Re-emerge all ebuilds with missing files (Gentoo Linux)
Revised approach to and3k's version, using pipes and read rather than command substitution. This does not require fiddling with IFS when paths have whitespace, and does not risk hitting command-line size limits. It's less verbose on the missing files, but it stops iterating at the first file that's missing, so it should be definitely faster. I expanded all the qlist options to be more self-describing.

Find the package that installed a command

Get notified when a job you run in a terminal is done, using NotifyOSD
This is an alias you can add to your .bashrc file to get notified when a job you run in a terminal is done. example of use sleep 20; alert Source:http://www.webupd8.org/2010/07/get-notified-when-job-you-run-in.html

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Redirecting bash output into any X Window
bash output is inserted into the clipboard, then mousepad is started and the clipboard content is pasted. xsel and xdotool needs to be installed. Instead of the mousepad any other editor can be used. I've successfully tested the Sublime Text Editor and it opens a new tab for each new paste. Check Sample output for a usage example. This command is originated from here - http://goo.gl/0q9UT4

An alarm clock using xmms2 and at
Nice little alarm clock to wake you up on time (hopefully). You can also do 'echo "vlc path/to/song" | at 6:00

Convert embedded spaces in filenames to "_" (underscore)
This command converts filenames with embedded spaces in the current directory replacing spaces with the underscore ("_") character.


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: