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

Get a docker container's run command line
A good way to build a new container when you don't remember how you did it the first time

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

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"

Compression formats Benchmark
See: http://imgur.com/JgjK2.png for example. Do some serious benchmarking from the commandline. This will write to a file with the time it took to compress n bytes to the file (increasing by 1). Run: $ gnuplot -persist

start vim in diff mode
vim will open both files side by side and show colored diffs

Start a command on only one CPU core
This is useful if you have a program which doesn't work well with multicore CPUs. With taskset you can set its CPU affinity to run on only one core.

Remove a file whose name begins with a dash ( - ) character
Using the redundant ./ directory information prevents the dash from occurring at the beginning of the filename, and being interpreted as an option of the rm command. Also works using: $ rm -- -filename

print text in colors green, cyan, blue or red (see sample output for usage)

Big Countdown Clock with hours, minutes and seconds
Figlet is easy to find for download on the internet, and works for any text. Quite cool.

Backup a file with a date-time stamp
1. you don't need to prepend the year with 20 - just use Y instead of y 2. you may want to make your function a bit more secure: buf () { cp ${1?filename not specified}{,$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)}; }


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: