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

Listen to a song from youtube with youtube-dl and mpv
Explanation Firstly the function checks if user gave it any input, and notifies the user if they failed to do so. If user has inputed a search string, the function will call upon youtube-dl to find url of the audio of the first matching youtube video and play that with mpv. Call function by wrapping search string in quotes: listen-to-yt "sultans of swing" You have to paste the line in your .zshrc and source .zshrc for it to work. Limitations The dependancies are youtube-dl and mpv. this oneliner is stolen from http://www.bashoneliners.com/oneliners/302/

analyze traffic remotely over ssh w/ wireshark
commandline for mac os x

Connect to TCP port 5000, transfer data and close connexion.
With no '-q 0' switch, nc simply waits, and whatever awaits the data hangs.

Countdown Clock
Countdown clock - Counts down from $MIN minutes to zero. I let the date command do the maths. This version doesn't use seq.

Sort lines using the Xth characted as the start of the sort string
Tells sort to ignore all characters before the Xth position in the first field per line. If you have a list of items one per line and want to ignore the first two characters for sorting purposes, you would type "sort -k1.3". Change the "1" to change the field being sorted. The decimal value is the offset in the specified field to sort by.

Lint Git unstaged PHP files
Checks for syntax errors in PHP files modified in current working copy of a Git repository.

Switch to a user with "nologin" shell
You need sudo privileges for this command. Replace username with actual username.

Getting started with tcpdump
At some point you want to know what packets are flowing on your network. Use tcpdump for this. The man page is obtuse, to say the least, so here are some simple commands to get you started. -n means show IP numbers and don't try to translate them to names. -l means write a line as soon as it is ready. -i eth0 means trace the packets flowing through the first ethernet interface. src or dst w.x.y.z traces only packets going to or from IP address w.x.y.z. port 80 traces only packets for HTTP. proto udp traces only packets for UDP protocol. Once you are happy with each option combine them with 'and' 'or' 'not' to get the effects you want.

Print a great grey scale demo !
Seen here: http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/terminal_colours/

Outputs a 10-digit random number


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: