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

Update twitter from command line without reveal your password
Update twitter from commandline, without revealing your password and without having to type it interactively. You 'll need to put a line "machine twitter.com login TWITTERUSER password TWITTERPASS" in $HOME/.netrc and better chmod 600 that file.

Copy the contents of one partition to another

PulseAudio: set the volume via command line
If you have more than one SINK

Single use vnc-over-ssh connection
This command 1. SSH into a machine 2. Tunnels VNC port to your local computer ("-L 5900:localhost:5900") 3. Runs a single use vnc server ("x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once -display :0") 4. Goes into the background ("-f") 5. Runs VNC viewer on the local computer connecting to the remote machine via the newly created SSH tunnel ("vinagre localhost:5900")

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"

List only executables installed by a debian package
Safe for whitespaces in names.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Generate a Random MAC address
Use the following variation for FreeBSD: $ openssl rand 6 | xxd -p | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/:$//'

check open ports without netstat or lsof

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


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: