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

Find the package that installed a command

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"

Show drive names next to their full serial number (and disk info)
As of this writing, this requires a fairly recent version of util-linux, but is much simpler than the previous alternatives. Basically, lsblk gives a nice, human readable interface to all the blkid stuff. (Of course, I wouldn't recommend this if you're going to be parsing the output.) This command takes all the fun out of the previous nifty pipelines, but I felt I ought to at least mention it as an alternative since it is the most practical.

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 all file extensions in a directory
Works on current directory, with built-in sorting.

Put readline into vi mode
This lets you use your favorite vi edit keys to navigate your term. To set it permanently, put "set editing-mode vi" in your ~/.inputrc or /etc/inputrc.

Open a manpage in the default (graphical) web browser
An easy alias for opening a manpage, nicely HTML formatted, in your set internet browser. If you get a "command exited with status 3" error you need to install groff.

list folders containing less than 2 MB of data
Just shortened the awk a bit and removed sed. Edit: I'm assuming there are no spaces in the path. To support white space in pathname try: $ awk '($1 < 2048) {sub(/^[0-9]+[ \t]+/,""); print $0}'

Backup with versioning

convert strings toupper/tolower with tr


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: