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

Random unsigned integer
works at least in bash. returns integer in range 0-32767. range is not as good, but for lots of cases it's good enough.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Print the current time on the whole screen, updated every second
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/projects#screen-message now also supports reading stdin continuously to update what it shows, different ?slides? separated by a form feed character. Here, we feed the current time into it each second to create a large clock.

list files recursively by size

Undo several commits by committing an inverse patch.
Use this to make a new commit that "softly" reverts a branch to some commit (i.e. squashes the history into an inverse patch). You can review the changes first by doing the diff alone.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

formatting number with comma
it is not work with Cygwin's bash3.X. Test in Linux. use printf "%'f" number while it is floating point number

Flush and then immediately start watching a file
This is useful for keeping an eye on an error log while developing. The !^ pulls the first arg from the previous command (which needs to be run in a sub-shell for this shortcut to work).

pipe output to notify-send
Route output to notify-send to show nice messages on the desktop, e.g. title and interpreter of the current radio stream

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: