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

Adding formatting to an xml document for easier reading
Sometimes you're trying to read through an xml file to determine whats wrong with it and a tool had removed all the linebreaks. xmllint will go ahead and make it pretty for you.

list files recursively by size

Sort file greater than a specified size in human readeable format including their path and typed by color, running from current directory
1. find file greater than 10 MB 2. direct it to xargs 3. xargs pass them as argument to ls

Kill all processes that don't belong to root/force logoff
explanation: grep -- displays process ids -v -- negates the matching, displays all but what is specified in the other options -u -- specifies the user to display, or in this case negate The process loops through all PIDs that are found by pgrep, then orders a forced kill to the processes in numerical order, effectively killing the parent processes first including the shells in use which will force the users to logout. Tested on Slackware Linux 12.2 and Slackware-current

small CPU benchmark with PI, bc and time.
$ # 4 cores with 2500 pi digits $ CPUBENCH 4 2500 $. $ every core will use 100% cpu and you can see how fast they calculate it. $ if you do 50000 digitits and more it can take hours or days

Poor's man Matrix script
This creates a matrix of letters that run forever until you hit Ctrl-C simulating "The Matrix" effect... just for fun :) You may want to try the -n and -y switch to change the "FX" LOL! e.g.: pwgen -ny 3

Analyse writing style of writing style of a document
Style analyses the surface characteristics of the writing style of a document. It prints various readability grades, length of words, sentences and paragraphs. It can further locate sentences with certain characteristics. If no files are given, the document is read from standard input. style is part of "diction" package

determine if tcp port is open
for udp nmap -sU -p 80 hostname

Buffer in order to avoir mistakes with redirections that empty your files
A common mistake in Bash is to write command-line where there's command a reading a file and whose result is redirected to that file. It can be easily avoided because of : 1) warnings "-bash: file.txt: cannot overwrite existing file" 2) options (often "-i") that let the command directly modify the file but I like to have that small function that does the trick by waiting for the first command to end before trying to write into the file. Lots of things could probably done in a better way, if you know one...

Generate a shortened URL with is.gd
Check the API. You shouldn't need sed. The print-newline at the end is to prevent zsh from inserting a % after the end-of-output. Also works with http://v.gd


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: