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

Encrypted archive with openssl and tar
command to decrypt: $ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -d < secret.tar.enc | tar x Of course, don't forget to rm the original files ;) You may also want to look at the openssl docs for more options.

floating point operations in shell scripts
using bc is for sissies. dc is much better :-D Polish notation will rule the world...

Find the package that installed a command

Console clock -- within screen
Configures screen to always display the clock in the last line (has to be configured only once). After that you not only have got the possibility to detach sessions and run them in background, but also have got a nice clock permanently on your screen.

Sort a character string
using perl

kill process by name
Or even easier, if it's available: $ killall firefox I have no idea why you would want to rely on two unusual dependencies to do something that can be done a hundred ways from coreutils...

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Remove color codes (special characters) with sed

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"


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: