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

The BOFH Excuse 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"

Ping Twitter to check if you can connect
Returns a JSON object, by connecting to the 'test' endpoint of the Twitter API. Simplest way to check if you can connect to Twitter. Output also available in XML, use '/help/test.xml' for that

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Export OPML from Google Reader

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs
I removed the dependency of the English language

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Auto Rotate Cube (compiz)
Strip my code to: wmctrl -o 0,0 # autorotates to the first face. In fact [0-1279],0 wmctrl - 1280,0 # goes to the second face wmctrl -o 2560,0 # goes to the third face, and so on. # Use multiples of the horizontal display resolution. My example work for 1280x800 display, been 1280 the number of interest. Tweak the number, try a biiiig one and see your cube spinning... I put a complex example to show how fun things can be, even for my ademco and paradox alarm central network advisor interface xpto etc. It rotates two faces, print the alarm message, and goes back tho where it was. Tested on BIGLINUX 4.2, equivalent to ubuntu LTS hardy. Do not forget to activate 3D efects ( compiz cube )

watch process stack, sampled at 1s intervals
This command repeatedly gets the specified process' stack using pstack (which is an insanely clever and tiny wrapper for gdb) and displays it fullscreen. Since it updates every second, you rapidly get an idea of where your program is stuck or spending time. The 'tac' is used to make the output grow down, which makes it less jumpy. If the output is too big for your screen, you can always leave the 'tac' off to see the inner calls. (Or, better yet--get a bigger screen.) Caveats: Won't work with stripped binaries and probably not well with threads, but you don't want to strip your binaries or use threads anyway.

Watch Data Usage on eth0


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: