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

Remove all cached images for icons related to your profile
Run inside Command Prompt (cmd.exe) as admin. Note that you must close explorer.exe first, and even so some files will not be deleted, will say "Access is denied." To definitely delete them enter with another admin user or from other operating system and access the drive.

Find name of package which installed a given shell command
Some command names are very different from the name of the package that installed them. Sometimes, you may want to find out the name of the package that provided a command on a system, so that you can install it on another system.

list files recursively by size

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command
Allows you to edit your command using your chosen editor. Works in bash with "set -o vi".

replace spaces in filenames with underscores
This command will replace all the spaces in all the filenames of the current directory with underscores. There are other commands that do this here, but this one is the easiest and shortest.

Discover the process start time
That is useful to discover the start time of process older than 1 day. You can also run: $ ls -ld /proc/PID That's returning the creation date of the proc files from the process. Some users reported that this way might show you a wrong date since any other process like cron, for example, could change this date.

Write on the console without being registered
just use a space to prevent commands from being recorded in bash's history on most systems

Syntax Highlight your Perl code

Show bandwidth use oneliner
poorman's ifstat using just sh and awk. You must change "eth0" with your interface's name.

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"


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: