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

Backup of a partition
Clone a partion with tar.

print first n characters of any file in human readble form using hexdump
Usefull to determine unknown file type

Adding formatting to an xml document for easier reading
This will indent the input to be more readable. Warnings and messages are not send to STDOUT so you can just use a pipe to create the formatted outputfile, like: $ tidy -i -xml in.xml > out.xml

Convert camelCase to underscores (camel_case)
Useful for switching over someone else's coding style who uses camelCase notation to your style using all lowercase with underscores.

Kill all Zombie processes if they accept it!
Tested on FreeBSD 8.1 and CSH. The scripts works correctly but the Zombies do not die! I hope it will run and function as expected in Linux and others.

Convert unix timestamp to date
The "-d" option for gnu's "date" command can calculate positive or negative offset from any time, including "now". You can even specify a source timezone (the output timezone can be set with the TZ environment variable). Useful! Fun! Not very well documented!

Stream YouTube URL directly to mplayer.

Top Command in batch mode
running top command in batch mode. it is usefull if you want to redirect the output in a file.

Rename files in batch

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: