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

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Find all files containing a word
This command will find all files recursively containing the phrase entered, represented here by "searchphrase". This particular command searches in all php files, but you could change that to just be html files or just log files etc.

Refresh the cache of font directory
Refresh the cache of font directory , usefull after you download font (.ttf or other) from various website and you don't want to reboot or relogin . Close your word processor before using the command , after the refresh reopen your word processor , new fonts is avaible !

Get rid from a blank display without reboot
Killall5 will kill your session and redirect to login screen. -Very useful when suffering display problems. -Can use F1-F6 -Need to login in the particular console if not already

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

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"

Find where a kind of file is stored
In this case searches for where .desktop files are stored. The resulted is a sorted list of the top directories containing such files.

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"

Find all files under a certain directory /home that have a certain suffix at the end of the file name. Show the file and rename them to remove the suffix.

find directory with most inodes/files
Find which directory in one filesystem that contains most inodes or files.


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: