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

Schedule a command while one is already running.
Useful when you have only one terminal session e.g. ssh. and want to queue up another command after the currently running has finished(in case if you forget to run that command). Originally used as ; python-updater when running emerge. When I have noticed that a package failed due to that command not run.

Verify if ntpd is working properly
Used to verify if Network Time Protocol daemon is working properly.

Collect a lot of icons from /usr/share/icons (may overwrite some, and complain a bit)
Today I needed to choose an icon for an app. My simpler way: put all of /usr/share/icons in myicons folder and brows'em with nautilus. Then rm -r 'ed the entire dir.

save command output to image

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"

calulate established tcp connection of local machine
If you want prepend/append text just wrap in echo: $echo Connected: `netstat -an|grep -ci "tcp.*established"`

(Debian/Ubuntu) Discover what package a file belongs to
'dpkg -S' just matches the string you supply it, so just using 'ls' as an argument matches any file from any package that has 'ls' anywhere in the filename. So usually it's a good idea to use an absolute path. You can see in the second example that 12 thousand files that are known to dpkg match the bare string 'ls'.

List upgrade-able packages on Ubuntu
Taken from apticron and modified.

most used unix commands

Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net


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: