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

Adding a startup script to be run at bootup Ubuntu
This script will run each time you boot up.The script must be in /etc/init.d directory.

apt-get via sudo
An apt-get wrapper function which will run the command via sudo, but will run it normally if you're only downloading source files. This was a bit of an excuse to show off the framework of $ cmd && echo true || echo false ...but as you can see, you must be careful about what is in the "true" block to make sure it executes without error, otherwise the "false" block will be executed. To allow the apt-get return code to pass through, you need to use a more normal if/else block: $ apt-get () { if [ "$1" = source ]; then command apt-get "$@"; else sudo apt-get "$@"; fi }

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command
Allows you to edit your command using your chosen editor. Works in bash with "set -o vi".

Delete leading whitespace from the start of each line
Removes any whitespace characters at the beginning of a line.

Simple addicting bash game.
hold period (or whatever character) and hit enter after a second. You need to make the next line of periods the same length as the previous line... score starts at 0 and increase each time length of line is same.

To find the LDAP clients connected to LDAP service running on Solaris

Sort and count subjects of emails stuck in Exim queue

convert binary data to shellcode

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
For some reason the 2&>1 does not work for me, but the shorter stdout/stderr redirection >& works perfectly (Ubuntu 10.04).

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"


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: