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

use screen as a terminal emulator to connect to serial consoles
Use GNU/screen as a terminal emulator for anything serial console related. screen /dev/tty eg. screen /dev/ttyS0 9600 MacOSX: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061109133825654 Cheat Sheet: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/screen-terminal-emulator-cheat-sheet/

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Block the 6700 worst spamhosts
The above url contains over 6700 of the common ad websites. The command just pastes these into your /etc/hosts.

Colorizes an access log
Puts a splash of color in your access logs. IP addresses are gray, 200 and 304 are green, all 4xx errors are red. Works well with e.g. "colorize access_log | less -R" if you want to see your colors while paging. Use as inspiration for other things you might be tailing, like syslog or vmstat Usage: $ tail -f access.log | colorize

Bare Metal IRC Client
Uses the extremely cool utilities netcat and expect. "expect" logs in & monitors for server PING checks. When a PING is received it sends the PONG needed to stay connected. IRC commands to try: HELP, TIME, MOTD, JOIN and PRIVMSG The "/" in front of IRC commands are not needed, e.g. type JOIN #mygroup Learn about expect: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue48/fisher.html The sample output shows snippets from an actual IRC session. Please click UP button if you like it!

Backup trought SSH

List and delete files older than one year

Get a metascore from metacritic.com
This will fetch a metascore from metacritic.com. It requires a url from metacritic without the http://www.metacritic.com/ Example: $ metascore games/platforms/wii/supermariogalaxy - $ metascore tv/shows/marriageref - $ metascore video/titles/newmoon Would be cool to use this in some sort of a graph.

Watch memcache traffic
View all memcache traffic

Create several copies of a file
Copy a file to a range of other files.


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: