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

Display 16 largest installed RPMs in size order, largest first
Interesting to see which packages are larger than the kernel package. Useful to understand which RPMs might be candidates to remove if drive space is restricted.

Simple addicting bash game.
Really bored during class so I made this... Basically, you hold period (or whatever) and hit enter after a second and you need to make the next line of periods the same length as the previous line... My record was 5 lines of the same length. It's best if you do it one handed with your pointer on period and ring on enter.

read unixtimestamp with festival
you will hear how many seconds since 1.1.1970 in english words with billions, millions and thousands. this is very useful, if you want to get over to use the unixtimestamp instead of the 24 hour clock in your dayly life

Determine what version of bind is running on a dns server.
Due to the recent dynamic update vulnerability with bind, I was forced to dig a little deeper into dig...

Print IP of any interface. Useful for scripts.

Search for a process by name
ps and grep is a dangerous combination -- grep tries to match everything on each line (thus the all too common: grep -v grep hack). ps -C doesn't use grep, it uses the process table for an exact match. Thus, you'll get an accurate list with: ps -fC sh rather finding every process with sh somewhere on the line.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
Sends SIGINFO to the process. This is a BSD feature OS X inherited. You must have the terminal window executing dd selected when entering CTRL + T for this to work.

Count all files in directories recursively with find
Counts the files present in the different directories recursively. One only has to change maxdepth to have further insight in the directory hierarchy. Found at unix.stackexchange.com: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4105/how-do-i-count-all-the-files-recursively-through-directories

Get your commandlinefu points (upvotes - downvotes)
This version prints current votes and commands for a user. Pass the user as an argument. While this technically "fits" as a one liner, it really is easier to look at as a shell script with extra whitespace. :)


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: