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

Apache memory usage

while using lxde and being blinded by your laptop screen, you can type:
I'm not sure what apt this is, but it seems to work on most X screens, an is useful for saving power, and not straining your eyes

display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)

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()"

Prettify an XML file
Like `tidy`, `xmllint` can be used to prettify XML files. The --nsclean option is also useful to remove redundant namespaces.

easily strace all your apache processes
This version also attaches to new processes forked by the parent apache process. That way you can trace all current and *future* apache processes.

Filter IP's in apache access logs based on use
Show's per IP of how many requests they did to the Apache webserver

Reload all sysctl variables without reboot
Use `sysctl -p` without argument will only load /etc/sysctl.conf, but user configs always put in /etc/sysctl.d/*.conf, `sysctl --system` will load all the config files

Remove newlines from output
Pipe any output to "grep ." and blank lines will not be printed.

Send keypresses to an X application
This is a (last resort) way to automate applications that provide no other ways for automation, it would send 'Hello world' to the currently active window. See the manpage (and the -text and -window entries) for how to send special characters and target specific windows. An example: Using xwininfo, I get the id of my XPlanet background window: alanceil@kvirasim:19:51:0:~> xwininfo xwininfo: Please select the window about which you would like information by clicking the mouse in that window. xwininfo: Window id: 0x3600001 "Xplanet 1.2.0" Absolute upper-left X: 0 (..etc..) Now I use xvkbd to tell it to close itself: xvkbd -xsendevent -window 0x3600001 -text "Q" Obviously, the best way is to put these commands in a shellscript - just make sure to include a short sleep (sleep .1 should suffice) after each xvkbd call, or some programs will become confused.


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: