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

kill ip connection
needed; apt-get install tcpkill

Check if you work on a virtual/physical machine in Linux
Command used to know if we are working on a virtual or physical machine. This command will use the dmidecode utility to retrieve hardware information of your computer via the BIOS. Run this command as root or with sudo.

Converts all pngs in a folder to webp using all available cores
As an alternative to the above command, this one ditches the unnecessary and complicated for loop in favor of a way faster multi-core approach for a task that's more CPU than I/O intensive, making it a perfect suite for GNU parallel

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"

Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable
If you want to do the same in OS X... grep as necessary for information you need....

cycle through a 256 colour palette
just for fun

!* Tells that you want all of the *arguments* from the previous command to be repeated in the current command
Example: touch file{1,2,3}; chmod 777 !*

Enable ** to expand files recursively (>=bash-4.0)
Since bash 4.0, you can use ** to recursively expand to all files in the current directory. This behaviour is disabled by default, this command enables it (you'd best put it in your .profile). See the sample output for clarification. In my opinion this is much better than creating hacks with find and xargs when you want to pass files to an application.

Query well known ports list
Uses the file located in /etc/services

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders


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: