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

Show errors in the kernel ring buffer
Much more useful then parsing syslog

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"

Email yourself a quick message
Usage: mailme message This is a useful function if you want to get notified about process completion or failure. e.g. $ mailme "process X completed"

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"

Rename files in batch

Transform a portrait pdf in a landscape one with 2 pages per page
This is an example of the usage of pdfnup (you can find it in the 'pdfjam' package). With this command you can save ink/toner and paper (and thus trees!) when you print a pdf. This tools are very configurable, and you can make also 2x2, 3x2, 2x3 layouts, and more (the limit is your fantasy and the resolution of the printer :-) You must have installed pdfjam, pdflatex, and the LaTeX pdfpages package in your box.

Count number of files in subdirectories
For each directory from the current one, list the counts of files in each of these directories. Change the -maxdepth to drill down further through directories.

get all bookmarks from all profiles from firefox
for i in $(ls /home/marco/.mozilla/firefox/*\.*/places.sqlite); do sqlite3 $i "SELECT strftime('%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S', dateAdded/1000000, 'unixepoch', 'localtime'),url FROM moz_places, moz_bookmarks WHERE moz_places.id = moz_bookmarks.fk ORDER BY dateAdded;"; done

Mount a partition from within a complete disk dump
Suppose you made a backup of your hard disk with dd: dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/disk/backup.img This command enables you to mount a partition from inside this image, so you can access your files directly. Substitute PARTITION=1 with the number of the partition you want to mount (returned from sfdisk -d yourfile.img).

Access to specific man page section
You can view the man pages from section five by passing the section number as an argument to the man command


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: