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

delete duplicate lines from a file and keep the order of the other lines
i wanted to delete all duplicate lines from .bash_history and keep the order of the other lines. the command cat's the file and adds line numbers, then sorts by the second column. afterwards uniq omits repeated lines, but skips the first field (the line number). then it sorts by the line numbers and at the end cuts the numbers off.

Kills a process that is locking a file.
Useful when you're trying to unmount a volume and other sticky situations where a rogue process is annoying the hell out of you.

repeat any string or char n times without spaces between
(here is character '+' repeated 80 times) Sometimes needed to enhance the title of the script.

Download Entire YouTube Channel - all of a user's videos
create the function then run 'yt-chanrip username' to download that user's entire channel. uses youtube-dl and the GData API. similar to http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3154/download-youtube-playlist

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"

send tweets to twitter (and get user details)
great for outputting tweets from cron jobs and batch scripts

Add line number count as C-style comments
I often find the need to number enumerations and other lists when programming. With this command, create a new file called 'inputfile' with the text you want to number. Paste the contents of 'outputfile' back into your source file and fix the tabbing if necessary. You can also change this to output hex numbering by changing the "%02d" to "%02x". If you need to start at 0 replace "NR" with "NR-1". I adapted this from http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/20/easily-add-line-numbers-to-a-text-file/.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Watch movies in your terminal
requires mplayer

Remotely sniff traffic and pass to snort
I have a small embedded linux device that I wanted to use for sniffing my external network, but I didn't want to recompile/cross-compile snort for the embedded platform. So I used tcpdump over ssh to pass all the traffic as pcap data to a "normal" Linux system that then takes the pcap data and passes it to snort for processing.


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: