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

Synchronize date and time with a server over ssh
using -u is better for standardizing date output and timezones, for servers in different timezones.

Perl Command Line Interpreter
Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop - REPL

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 Directories in the PATH Which does NOT Exist
I often need to know of my directory in the PATH, which one DOES NOT exist. This command answers that question * This command uses only bash's built-in commands * The parentheses spawn a new sub shell to prevent the modification of the IFS (input field separator) variable in the current shell

Stop long commands wrapping around and over-writing itself in the Bash shell
add the command either in /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile so that this is available to your shell.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Securely destroy data (including whole hard disks)
GNU shred is provided by the coreutils package on most Linux distribution (meaning, you probably have it installed already), and is capable of wiping a device to DoD standards. You can give shred any file to destroy, be it your shell history or a block device file (/dev/hdX, for IDE hard drive X, for example). Shred will overwrite the target 25 times by default, but 3 is enough to prevent most recovery, and 7 passes is enough for the US Department of Defense. Use the -n flag to specify the number of passes, and man shred for even more secure erasing fun. Note that shredding your shell history may not be terribly effective on devices with journaling filesystems, RAID copies or snapshot copies, but if you're wiping a single disk, none of that is a concern. Also, it takes quite a while :)

List only directories, one per line
Alternatively, $ ls -F | grep /\$ but will break on directories containing newlines. Or the safe, POSIX sh way (but will miss dotfiles): $ for i in *; do test -d "./$i" && printf "%s\n" "$i"; done

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

convert a line to a space


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: