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 out how old a web page is
I used to use the Firefox "View page info" feature a lot to determine how stale the web page I was looking at was. Now that I use mostly Chrome I miss that feature, so here is a command line alternative using wget. The -S says to display the server response, the --spider says to not download any files/pages, just fetch the header. The output goes to stderr, so to grep it you use 2>&1 to combine the stderr stream with stdout, the pipe that to grep for Last-Modified. You can use curl instead if you have it installed, like this: $ curl --head -s http://osswin.sourceforge.net | grep Mod

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"

show hidden chars in vi

NSA codename generator
nsacodenamegenerator dot com is no more outputs random two words together in capital letters

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

add the result of a command into vi
in command mode, navigate your cursor to the line where you want the command output to appear, and hit "!!". No need to enter edit mode or even type a ":" (colon).

Recursive Ownership Change
Changing files ownership in a directory recursivley from a user to another

grep expression (perl regex) to extract all ip addresses from both ip and ifconfig commands output
It uses the following GNU grep options: "-o" which shows only the matching part of the line and "-P" which allows the use of Perl regular expressions.

return external ip

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously


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: