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

log a command to console and to 2 files separately stdout and stderr

Pack up some files into a tarball on a remote server without writing to the local filesystem
I recently found myself with a filesystem I couldn't write to and a bunch of files I had to get the hell out of dodge, preferably not one at a time. This command makes it possible to pack a bunch of files into a single archive and write it to a remote server.

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"

sed /pat/!d without using sed (no RE; limited to shell patterns aka globbing)
POSIX requires this "string truncating" functionality. might as well use it, at least for very small tasks where invoking sed and using RE is overkill.

Recursively grep thorugh directory for string in file.
-R, -r, --recursive Read all files under each directory, recursively; this is equivalent to the -d recurse option.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Not a kismet replacement...
If you're like some individuals who rely on ndiswrapper and cannot use kismet, this command may be of service. watch -n .5 "iwlist wlan0 scan | egrep 'ESSID|Encryption'" Or... watch -n .5 "iwlist wlan0 scan | egrep 'ESSID|Encryption' | egrep 'linksys'" :-) Hopefully you'll find some dd-wrt compatible routers.

Decrypt passwords from Google Chrome and Chromium.
Read this before you down voting and comment that it is not working -> Wont work on latest versions ~75> since database file is locked and has to be decrypted. This is useful if you have an old hdd with a chrome installation and want to decrypt your old passwords fast.

Get a funny one-liner from www.onelinerz.net
Put this command in .bashrc and every time you open a new terminal a random quote will be downloaded and printed from onelinerz.net. By altering the URL in the w3m statement you can change the output: 1 to 10 lines - http://www.onelinerz.net/random-one-liners/(number)/ 20 newest lines - http://www.onelinerz.net/latest-one-liners/ Top 10 lines - http://www.onelinerz.net/top-100-funny-one-liners/ Top 10 lines are updated daily.

list with full path


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: