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

whowatch: Linux and UNIX interactive, process and users monitoring tool
whowatch is a interactive, ncurses-based, process and users monitoring tool, which updates information in real time. This is a perfect tool for local and remote servers. It displays information about the users currently logged on to the machine, in real-time. Besides standard information (login name, tty, host, user's process), the type of the connection (ie. telnet or ssh) is shown. Display of users command line can be switch to tty idle time. Certain user can be selected and his processes tree may be viewed as well as tree of all system processes. Tree may be displayed with additional column that shows owner of each process. In the process tree mode SIGINT and SIGKILL signals can be sent to the selected process. Killing processes is just as simple and fun as deleting lines on the screen.

host - DNS lookup utility
host is a simple utility for performing DNS lookups. It is normally used to convert names to IP addresses and vice versa. When no arguments or options are given, host prints a short summary of its command line arguments and options.

Produce a pseudo random password with given length in base 64
Don't copy trailing '=' or use head -c to limit to desired length.

Trigger a command each time a file is created in a directory (inotify)
Listens for events in the directory. Each created file is displayed on stdout. Then each fileline is read by the loop and a command is run. This can be used to force permissions in a directory, as an alternative for umask. More details: http://en.positon.org/post/A-solution-to-the-umask-problem%3A-inotify-to-force-permissions

Remove all the files except abc in the directory
This is for zsh with extended globbing.

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"

Using parcellite, indents the content of the clipboard manager
This command takes the content of a Parcellite-managed clipboard manager and add one level of indentation to it. It may be useful to indent a block of code which will enter inside another, already indented one but I use it mostly to indent code I will post in Stack Overflow questions and answers.

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.

Print the detailed statistics of transferred bytes by the firewall rules

Find the package that installed a command


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: