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

open two files on top of each other in vim (one window, two panes)

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

command! -nargs=1 Vs vs <args>
Because entering ':' requires that you press shift, sometimes common command-line / mini-buffer commands will be capitalized by accident.

Decrypt passwords from Google Chrome and Chromium.
Read this before you down voting and comment that it is not working -> Wont work on latest versions ~75> since database file is locked and has to be decrypted. This is useful if you have an old hdd with a chrome installation and want to decrypt your old passwords fast.

32 bits or 64 bits?
Easy and direct way to find this out.

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 International Space Station sighting information for your city
This command outputs a table of sighting opportunities for the International Space Station. Find the URL for your city here: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/

Show complete URL in netstat output
The -W switch of netstat makes it print complete URL of the connections, which otherwise by default is truncated to fit its default column size. Now to compensate for irregular column sizes, pipe the output to column (-t switch of column prints in tabular form). The only downside to this part is that the very first row, the header, goes pear shape.

Run 10 curl commands in parallel via xargs (v2, faster then v1)

Re-read partition table on specified device without rebooting system (here /dev/sda).


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: