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

Identify name and resolution of all jpgs in current directory

A fun thing to do with ram is actually open it up and take a peek. This command will show you all the string (plain text) values in ram

cpu info

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"

command shell generate random strong password
shell generate random strong password

Switch 2 characters on a command line.
If you typed 'sl', put the cursor on the 'l' and hit ctrl-t to get 'ls'.

Video thumbnail
Faster thumbnail creation than '-itsoffset' $ffmpeg -itsoffset -4 -i test.avi -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 test.jpg

Find files that have been modified on your system in the past 60 minutes
Useful mainly for debugging or troubleshooting an application or system, such as X11, Apache, Bind, DHCP and others. Another useful switch that can be combined with -mmin, -mtime and so forth is -daystart. For example, to find files that were modified in the /etc directory only yesterday: $ sudo find /etc -daystart -mtime 1 -type f

Recursively remove directory with many files quickly
rsync'ing an empty directory over a directory to be deleted recursively is much faster than using rm -rf, for various reasons. Relevant only for directories with really a lot of files.

Quickly ping range of IP adresses and return only those that are online
Tested in Debian, ymmv. - c 1 : send only one ping;; -W 1: wait for one second and then exit ping, assuming target IP is not available; change as needed (-W 0.5 for half a second, smaller or greater value depending on network speed/latency)


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: