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

Label EXT2/EXT3 File System

Create a persistent connection to a machine
Create a persistent SSH connection to the host in the background. Combine this with settings in your ~/.ssh/config: Host host ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster no All the SSH connections to the machine will then go through the persisten SSH socket. This is very useful if you are using SSH to synchronize files (using rsync/sftp/cvs/svn) on a regular basis because it won't create a new socket each time to open an ssh connection.

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

git remove files which have been deleted
It deletes all removed files, updates what was modified, and adds new files.

To find the count of each open file on a system (that supports losf)

easily strace all your apache *child* processes
Like the original version except it does not include the parent apache process or the grep process and adds "sudo" so it can be run by user.

Combine multiple images into a video using ffmpeg
The -start_number can be ignored if sequence starts with 0, otherwise use first number in sequence

Remind yourself to leave in 15 minutes
If you spend most of your time in front of the terminal, leave is a useful reminder. Leave can have absolute form: leave 1555 reminds you to leave at 3:55PM

Blacklist usb storage
Some times you may ban usb to protect thefting of your personal data. Blacklist the usb_storage module by adding blacklist usb_storage to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. To load the module manually, $sudo modprobe usb_storage.

Query Wikipedia via console over DNS
Shorter version, works with multiple words.


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: