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

repeat a command every one second
Short method of "while x=0; do foo ; sleep 1 ; done"

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"

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Poor man's ntpdate
If you don't have netcat, you can use curl.

Type a random string into a X11 window
Just after you type enter, you have 3 seconds to switch window, then "texthere" will be "typed" in the X11 application that has focus. Very useful to beat your score at games such as "How fast can you type A-Z".

list with full path

Listen to a file
replace "/usr/src/linux/kernel/signal.c" with any file you want and listen to its output ! :P you can also replace "cat" with "echo" or anything you can come up with have fun :-}

Preview of a picture in a terminal
This command allows you to see a preview of a picture via the terminal. It can be usefull when you are ssh'ing your server without X-forwarding. To have en example of the output you can get with this command see http://www.vimeo.com/3721117 Download at http://inouire.net/image-couleur.html Sources here: http://inouire.net/archives/image-couleur_source.tar.gz

run command on a group of nodes in parallel

Most used command


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: