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

"hidden" remote shell
opens a "hidden" remote shell (login will not appear in "last" for example). This is not really hidden, because the login will be shown in auth.log and the process is visible anyways. ssh -T = Disable pseudo-tty allocation. bash -i = interactive shell

check open ports without netstat or lsof

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.

Exit mc with 2 keystrokes
For those who like to hit instead of typing "exit" to leave the shell and find it annoying that it doesn't work in Midnight Commander, just press to switch to the subshell and now you can leave with

Resolution of a image
You can use the -format switch to get the size of the image. Replace "logo:" with your image.

Sort and count subjects of emails stuck in Exim queue

execute a shell with netcat without -e
Shorter version with proper stderr redirection .

list any Linux files without users or groups
suspicious/anomalous ownership may indicate system breach; should return no results

list files recursively by size

open path with your default GNOME program
Another step to bring cli and gui closer together: gnome-open It opens a path with the default (gui) application for its mime type. I would recommend a shorter alias like alias o=gnome-open More examples: $ gnome-open . [opens the current folder in nautilus / your default file browser] $ gnome-open some.pdf [opens some.pdf in evince / your default pdf viewer] $ gnome-open trash:// [opens the trash with nautilus] $ gnome-open http://www.commandlinefu.com [opens commandlinefu in your default webbrowser]


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: