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 files recursively by size

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

Show the disk usage for files pointed by symbolic link in a directory
You also can sum the file usage of all files $ find /usr/lib -maxdepth 1 -type l -print0 | xargs -r0 du -Lch

Use tee + process substitution to split STDOUT to multiple commands
Using process substitution, we can 'trick' tee into sending a command's STDOUT to an arbitrary number of commands. The last command (command4) in this example will get its input from the pipe.

Monitor TCP opened connections

Recursive cat - concatenate files (filtered by extension) across multiple subdirectories into one file
Useful if you have to put together multiple files into one and they are scattered across subdirectories. For example: You need to combine all .sql files into one .sql file that would be sent to DBAs as a batch script. You do get a warning if you create a file by the same extension as the ones your searching for. find . -type f -name *.sql -exec cat {} > BatchFile.txt \;

Change active bond slave
This forces a bonded interface to switch to another slave in the bond as its active slave.

'micro' ps aux (by mem/cpu)
mac os x: ps aux | awk '{print($1" "$3" "$4" "$11);}' | grep -v "0,0" linux: ps aux | awk '{print($1" "$3" "$4" "$11);}' | grep -v "0.0"

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.

Move all but the newest 100 emails to a gzipped archive


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: