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

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Create backup copy of file, adding suffix of the date of the file modification (NOT today's date)

Script executes itself on another host with one ssh command
Now put more interesting stuff on the script in replacement of hostname, even entire functions, etc, and stuff. hosta> cat myScript.sh #!/bin/sh [ $1 == "client" ] && hostname || cat $0 | ssh $1 /bin/sh -s client hosta> myScript.sh hostb hostb hosta>

Change mysql prompt to be more verbose
You can put this into your shell sourced file like .bashrc or .zshrc to have a different mysql prompt. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/de/mysql-commands.html for more informations. Beware that currently with mysql 5.5 the seconds are buggy and won't be displayed if you put this into a .cnf file. With the enironment variable this will work.

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"

Add all files not under subversion control

List programs with open ports and connections
I prefer to use this and not the -n variety, so I get DNS-resolved hostnames. Nice when I'm trying to figure out who's got that port open.

get header and footer of file for use with scalpel file carving
file carving helps if you know where the file you are looking for starts and ends. It's also an easy way to get data and catalog them for future use with forensic tools like scalpel.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Trick find -exec option to execute alias
An alias cannot be executed as command in a find -exec line. This form will trick the command line and let you do the job.


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: