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

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

make directory with current date

View a colorful logfile using less

Then end of the UNIX epoch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem Some other notable dates that have passed: $ date -d@1234567890 $ date -d@1000000000

List all active access_logs for currently running Apache or Lighttpd process
Ever logged into a *nix box and needed to know which webserver is running and where all the current access_log files are? Run this one liner to find out. Works for Apache or Lighttpd as long as CustomLog name is somewhat standard. HINT: works great as input into for loop, like this: $ for i in `lsof -p $(netstat -ltpn|awk '$4 ~ /:80$/ {print substr($7,1,index($7,"/")-1)}')| awk '$9 ~ /access.log$/ {print $9| "sort -u"}'` ; do echo $i; done Very useful for triage on unfamiliar servers!

Verbosely delete files matching specific name pattern, older than 15 days.

Get information on your graphics card on linux (such as graphics memory size)
probably only works if you have one graphics card. used this: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-find-linux-vga-video-card-ram/ as reference can be expanded, for example: $ lspci -v -s `lspci | awk '/VGA/{print $1}'` | sed -n '/Memory.*, prefetchable/s/.*\[size=\([^]]\+\)\]/\1/p' will just get the amount of prefetchable memory compare to: $ lshw -C display which does not give the size (it does give byte ranges and you could calculate the size from that, but that's a pain) Also uses a command which is not standard on linux; wheras lspci is a core utility provided by most systems

copy audio file from playlist to a floder
copy some file from xx.m3u to target folder

Lists all listening ports together with the PID of the associated process
The PID will only be printed if you're holding a root equivalent ID.

Use md5sum to check your music and movie files. Also use diff.
This is a beginning script. You can create a file with > filename. You can also use diff to compare output run at different times to verify no change in your files. I apologize in advance if this is too simple. For some it should be a start.


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: