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

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Continuously listen on a port and respond with a fixed message with netcat (and respond to kill signals)
`while true`: do forever `nc -l -p 4300 -c 'echo hello'`: this is the but anything can go here really `test $? -gt 0 && break`: this checks the return code for ctrl^c or the like and quite the loop, otherwise in order to kill the loop you'd have to get the parent process id and kill it.

When was your OS installed?
Show time and date when you installed your OS.

Counting the source code's line numbers C/C++ Java
Count your source and header file's line numbers. This ignores blank lines, C++ style comments, single line C style comments. This will not ignore blank lines with tabs or multiline C style comments.

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

A one-line web server in Ruby
Here's how to serve a directory in one line of Ruby. Handy for sharing files at a conference, for example.

List of commands you use most often

BASH: Print shell variable into AWK
Alternatively: export MyVAR=84; awk '{ print ENVIRON["MyVAR"] }'

Pretty Print a simple csv in the command line
Will handle pretty much all types of CSV Files. The ^M character is typed on the command line using Ctrl-V Ctrl-M and can be replaced with any character that does not appear inside the CSV. Tips for simpler CSV files: * If newlines are not placed within a csv cell then you can replace `map(repr, r)` with r

Bash autocomplete case insensitive search
Change bash autocomplete case search to insensitive when pressing tab for completion.


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: