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

zgrep across multiple files

Hostname tab-completion for ssh
This is meant for the bash shell. Put this function in your .profile and you'll be able to use tab-completion for sshing any host which is in your known_hosts file. This assumes that your known_hosts file is located at ~/.ssh/known_hosts. The "complete" command should go on a separate line as such: function autoCompleteHostname() { local hosts=($(awk '{print $1}' ~/.ssh/known_hosts | cut -d, -f1)); local cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}; COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W '${hosts[@]}' -- $cur )) } complete -F autoCompleteHostname ssh

Quickly re-execute a recent command in bash
! will expand to the last time you ran , options and all. It's a nicer alternative to ^R for simple cases, and it's quite helpful for those long commands you run every now and then and haven't made aliases or functions for. It's similar to command 3966, in some sense.

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 bash functions defined in .bash_profile or .bashrc

Recursive Line Count

list files recursively by size

Random Number Between 1 And X
If X is 5, it will about a number between 1 and 5 inclusive. This works in bash and zsh. If you want between 0 and 4, remove the +1.

Post a message to another users screen via SSH
Post a message on another users screen via SSH

send echo to socket network
Using netcat, usuallly installed on debian/ubuntu. Also to test against a sample server the following two commands may help echo got milk? | netcat -l -p 25 python -c "import SocketServer; SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler.handle = lambda self: self.request.send('got milk?\n'); SocketServer.TCPServer(('0.0.0.0', 25), SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler).serve_forever()"


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: