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

Test sendmail
test if sendmail is installed and working.

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"

Grabs a random image from "~/wallpapers" and sets as the background
don't bother spawning a bc process or counting the number of options, just pick a random one. 'sort -R' sorts randomly, so pick the top one.

Add all files in current directory to SVN
The --force option bypasses the warning if files are already in SVN.

Add thousand separator with sed, in a file or within pipe
Does not necessarily require a file to process, it can be used in a pipe as well: $ cat filename | sed -e :a -e 's/\(.*[0-9]\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)/\1,\2/;ta' I don't remember where I copy/pasted this from, I wish I credited the original author

On Screen micro display for battery and CPU temperature. nifty, small, omnipresent
My firefox overheats my cpu, sometimes above 90 degrees Celsius ( hence the name? ) To keep an eye on temperature, I put this command inside KAlarm ( a kind of cron) to be repeated every minute, for 5 seconds, color red ( default for osd_cat). Its pretty, ultra small, displays a micro 2 lines text on every desktop and over everything and do not steal focus or interrupt any task. I get the information passively, in the low profile bottom of the screen. Of course you can use it inside a terminal. Just do it: watch -n 60 'acpi -t | osd_cat -p bottom'

Get your outgoing IP address
Get your external ip adress thanks to http://www.icanhazip.com

Brute force discover
Show the number of failed tries of login per account. If the user does not exist it is marked with *.

Using json.tool from the shell to validate and pretty-print

Rename files in batch


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: