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

Unzip 25 zip files files at once

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

Remove blank lines from a file using grep and save output to new file

create an incremental backup of a directory using hard links
dname is a directory named something like 20090803 for Aug 3, 2009. lastbackup is a soft link to the last backup made - say 20090802. $folder is the folder being backed up. Because this uses hard linking, files that already exist and haven't changed take up almost no space yet each date directory has a kind of "snapshot" of that day's files. Naturally, lastbackup needs to be updated after this operation. I must say that I can't take credit for this gem; I picked it up from somewhere on the net so long ago I don't remember where from anymore. Ah, well... Systems that are only somewhat slicker than this costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars - but we're HACKERS! We don't need no steenkin' commercial software... :)

run command on a group of nodes in parallel
Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ Other examples would be: (echo foss.org.my; echo www.debian.org; echo www.freenetproject.org) | parallel traceroute seq -f %04g 0 9999 | parallel -X rm pict{}.jpg

Getting ESP and EIP addresses from running processes
'ps' let you specify the format that you want to see on the output.

Access folder "-"
If you try to access cd - you go to the last folder you were in.

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"

hanukkah colored bash prompt
blue and yellow colored bash prompt for a Hanukkah celebration on your box

a function to create a box of '=' characters around a given string.
The function 'box' takes either one or two arguments. The first argument is a line of text to be boxed, the second argument (optional) is a character to use to draw the box. By default, the drawing character will be '='. The function 'n()' is a helper function used to draw the upper and lower lines of the box, its arguments are a length, and an character to print. (I used 'n' because 'line', 'ln' and 'l' are all commonly used)


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: