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

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"

Syntax Highlight your Perl code
This uses Text::Highlight to output the specified Perl file with syntax highlighting. A better alternative is my App::perlhl - find it on the CPAN: http://p3rl.org/App::perlhl

kill some process (same as others) but parsing to a variable
Kills a process matching program. I suggest using $ pgrep -fl program to avoid over-killings Nice the following: kills all bash process owned by guest $ pkill -9 -f bash -u guest

Converts uppercase chars in a string to lowercase

Ad blocking on Ubuntu phone/tablet with hosts file
Will append lines to the hosts file to do some basic ad blocking.

Random line from bash.org (funny IRC quotes)
bash.org is a collection of funny quotes from IRC. WARNING: some of the quotes contain "adult" jokes... may be embarrassing if your boss sees them... Thanks to Chen for the idea and initial version! This script downloads a page with random quotes, filters the html to retrieve just one liners quotes and outputs the first one. Just barely under the required 255 chars :) Improvment: You can replace the head -1 at the end by: $awk 'length($0)>0 {printf( $0 "\n%%\n" )}' > bash_quotes.txt which will separate the quotes with a "%" and place it in the file. and then: $strfile bash_quotes.txt which will make the file ready for the fortune command and then you can: $fortune bash_quotes.txt which will give you a random quote from those in the downloaded file. I download a file periodically and then use the fortune in .bashrc so I see a funny quote every time I open a terminal.

Copy a directory recursively without data/files

tar and remove files which are older that 100 days
tar does not have a -mtime option as find. tar appends all the file to an existing tar file.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Recursively unrar into dir containing archive
From the cwd, recursively find all rar files, extracting each rar into the directory where it was found, rather than cwd. A nice time saver if you've used wget or similar to mirror something, where each sub dir contains an rar archive. Its likely this can be tuned to work with multi-part archives where all parts use ambiguous .rar extensions but I didn't test this. Perhaps unrar would handle this gracefully anyway?


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: