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

bash/ksh function: given a file, cd to the directory it lives
fcd : file change directory A bash function that takes a fully qualified file path and cd's into the directory where it lives. Useful on the commadline when you have a file name in a variable and you'd like to cd to the directory to RCS check it in or look at other files associated with it. Will run on any ksh, bash, likely sh, maybe zsh.

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"

Clean up after a poorly-formed tar file
These days, most software distributed in tar files will just contain a directory at the top level, but some tar files don't have this and can leave you with a mess of files in the current folder if you blindly execute $ tar zxvf something.tar.gz This command can help you clean up after such a mistake. However, note that this has the potential to do bad things if someone has been *really* nasty with filenames.

Download all recently uploaded pastes on pastebin.com

Displays the number of unread messages on your gmail at the top right corner of your terminal
Checks your gmail account every 30 seconds and display the number of new messages in the top right corner of the terminal. A kind of CLI "Gmail notifier" if you will. :-) This is a mashup of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/7916/put-a-console-clock-in-top-right-corner and http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3386/check-your-unread-gmail-from-the-command-line

List only the directories
-d: list directory entries instead of contents, and do not dereference symbolic links

Email HTML content
Note, this works because smtp is running

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

split a string (2)


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: