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

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.

Octal ls
Do ls with permissions written in octal form.

Print the IPv4 address of a given interface

Greets the user appropriately

merge vob files to mpg

List all information about all files (in current dir)
This is a funny usage of the traditional command ls. It could be basically simplified as: $ ls -a -l Duplicating arguments is permitted: $ ls -a -l -l And this markup could be shortened as: $ ls -al Extra note: To view filesizes like a pro, pray for your God: $ ls -allah

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"

check open ports (both ipv4 and ipv6)
Check open TCP and UDP ports

connect to X login screen via vnc
the $15 may change for you depending on your distro, etc...

Tar files matching a certain wildcard
This is a shortcut to tar up all files matching a wildcard. Tar doesn't have the --include (apparently).


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: