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

Generate a random password 30 characters long
This command is similar to the alternate, except with head(1), you can pick as many passwords as you wish to generate by changing the number of lines you wish to preview.

Huh? Where did all my precious space go ?
Sort ls output of all files in current directory in ascending order Just the 20 biggest ones: $ ls -la | sort -k 5bn | tail -n 20 A variant for the current directory tree with subdirectories and pretty columns is: $ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -la | sort -k 5bn | column -t And finding the subdirectories consuming the most space with displayed block size 1k: $ du -sk ./* | sort -k 1bn | column -t

Better recursive grep with pretty colors... requires ruby and gems (run: "gem install rak")

Rename files in batch

Read a keypress without echoing it
This shell snippet reads a single keypress from stdin and stores it in the $KEY variable. You do NOT have to press the enter key! The key is NOT echoed to stdout! This is useful for implementing simple text menus in scripts and similar things.

list files in mtime order
Simple but useful; list files in the current directory in mtime order. Useful if you've been working on something and then take a day or two off.

Download 10 random wallpapers from images.google.com

Touch a file using a timestamp embedded in the file name.
tstouch takes two arguments: a filename containing a timestamp, and an extended regular expression with the parenthesized section matching a timestamp of the form YYYYMMDDhhmm or YYYYMMDDhhmm.ss. It then touches the file with that timestamp.

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"

Printout a list of field numbers (awk index) from a CSV file with headers as first line.
Useful to identify the field number in big CSV files with large number of fields. The index is the reference to use in processing with commands like 'cut' or 'awk' involved.


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: