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

Check general system error on AIX
Check general system error on AIX

add the result of a command into vi
':r!ls -l' results in listing the files in the current directory and paste it into vi

Unzip multiple files with one command
With this command you can easily unzip multiple zip files with just one command. All you need to do is to use single quotes.

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"

Truncate long strings in columns and use custom header names
Using the --table-truncate ( -T ) option, you can specify the columns you will allow to be truncated. This helps when you have some columns that are unusually long, or a small terminal window. In this example we will print out the /etc/passwd file in columns. We are using a colon as our separator ( -s: ), defining that we want table output ( -t ), defining the column names ( -N ) and allowing the column NAME to be truncated ( -T ).

scp a good script from host A which has no public access to host C, but with a hop by host B
middlehost allows ssh access from where you are but not securehost. Use nice ssh piping to simulate scp through A => B => C setting up the shell function if left as an exercise for the reader. ;-) Agent forwarding should avoid password typing.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Launch firefox on a remote linux server
Actually 'firefox' is a script that then launches the 'firefox-bin' executable. You need to specify the 'no-remote' option in order to launch remote firefox instead of your local one (this drove me crazy time ago)

Convert spaces in file names to underscores

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously


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: