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 broken symlinks in the current directory and its subdirectories.
This is best run as root to avoid permission denials that can produce false positives. Obviously you can specify a directory in the usual way: $ find -L dirname -type l I can't remember where I read about this or who deserves the credit for it. The find(1) manual page hints strongly toward it, however.

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

Monitor a file's size
use "watch" instead of while-loops in these simple cases

Download all images from a site
This recursively downloads all images from a given website to your /tmp directory. The -nH and -nd switches disable downloading of the directory structure.

show current directory
Opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application.

Permanent mysql ssh tunnel to server

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"

print/scan lines starting at record ###
Useful for finding newly added lines to a file, tail + can be used to show only the lines starting at some offset. A syslog scanner would look at the file for the first time, then record the end_of_file record number using wc -l. Later (hours, days), scan only at the lines that were added since the last scan.

Run bash on top of a vi session (saved or not saved), run multiple commands, instead of one at a time with :!(bashcommand), type exit and [enter] to get back to where you left off in vi.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy


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: