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

List Threads by Pid along with Thread Start Time
This command will list all threads started by a particular pid along with the start time of each thread. This is very valuable when diagnosing thread leaks.

Rename files in batch

Get contents from hosts, passwd, groups even if they're in DB/LDAP/other
getent allows to get the contents of several databases in their native file format even if they are not actually in /etc. For example, if you are using a LDAP or a DB to authenticate your users, you won't find their info by catting /etc/passwd, but "getent passwd" will concatenate /etc/passwd to the LDAP/DB.

Read random news on the internet
Access a random news web page on the internet. The Links browser can of course be replaced by Firefox or any modern graphical web browser.

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"

Get a shell with a not available account

grab all commandlinefu shell functions into a single file, suitable for sourcing.
Each shell function has its own summary line, as a comment. If there are multiple shell functions with the same name, the function with the highest number of votes is put into the file. Note: added 'grep -v' to the end of the pipeline, to eliminate extraneous lines containing only '--'. Thanks to matthewbauer for pointing this out.

Edit the /etc/sudoers config file the right way.
'visudo' is installed by default on most Unix-like systems. If not installed, you can get it from the 'sudo' package. 'visudo' will use the text editor found in your $EDITOR variable, whether it's vi, vim, emacs, nano or gedit. After making changes to the /etc/sudoers file, visudo will check for syntax errors, and notify you of them. This is better than 'vi /etc/sudoers', because of this capability. Rule #1 of system administration- if there is a tool that exists for editing config files, use the tool.

Short URL to commandlinefu.com commands
Obviously replace the relevant parts as required. The following also work: $ lynx cmdl.in/efu/by-marcel -or- $ lynx cmdl.in/efu/view-9058

Copy all files, including hidden files, recursively without traversing backward
You could do the following, however, brace expansion with {} is not defined in POSIX, and therefore not guaranteed to work in all shells. But, if it does, it's more convenient (although it's certainly not less typing): $ cp -r {*,.??*} /dest Sometimes there are times when I need to cp(1), mv(1) or rm(1) files recursively, but don't want to traverse the previous directory by following ../../../../ etc out of the current directory. This command prevents that. The secret sauce is ".??*". The file globbing ensures that it must start with a dot, and be followed by at least two characters. So, three characters must exist in the filename, which eliminates "." and "..".


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: