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

Check which files are opened by Firefox then sort by largest size.
Just refining last proposal for this check, showing awk power to make more complex math (instead /1024/1024, 2^20). We don't need declare variable before run lsof, because $(command) returns his output. Also, awk can perform filtering by regexp instead to call grep. I changed the 0.0000xxxx messy output, with a more readable form purging all fractional numbers and files less than 1 MB.

Testing hard disk writing speed

Stream and copy a video from lan
Requires a listening port on HOST eg. "cat movie.mp4 | nc -l 1356 " (cat movie.mp4 | nc -l PORT) Useful if you're impatient and want to watch a movie immediately and download it at the same time without using extra bandwidth. You can't seek (it'll crash and kill the stream) but you can pause it.

Encryption file in commad line
This will encrypt your single file and create a filename.gpg file. Option: * -c : Encrypt with symmetric cipher To decrypt dhinesh@ubuntu:~$ gpg -c sample.rb.gpg

Perl Command Line Interpreter
Can also just use the debug mode like this.

Find the package that installed a command

Shows users and 'virtual users' on your a unix-type system
Shows a list of users that currently running processes are executing as. YMMV regarding ps and it's many variants. For example, you might need: $ ps -axgu | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort -u

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Print out your hard drive to a jet-direct compatible printer.
Where 192.168.1.2 is a printer with jet-direct. No, I don't suggest this as a backup method.

Create a backup of the file.
It will create a backup of the filename. The advantage is that if you list the folder the backups will be sorted by date. The command works on any unix in bash.


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: