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

extract column from csv file
extracts the 5th column using the delimiter ','

create an emergency swapfile when the existing swap space is getting tight
Create a temporary file that acts as swap space. In this example it's a 1GB file at the root of the file system. This additional capacity is added to the existing swap space.

kill ip connection
needed; apt-get install tcpkill

Most used command

See a full list of compiler defined symbols
From http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/01/msg00971.html .

lines in file2 that are not in file1

Traceroute w/TCP to get through firewalls.
man tcptraceroute

pip install into current directory without virtualenv
For subsequent commands in the prefixed path: $ PYTHONPATH=$PWD/lib/python*/site-packages ./bin/pip --version

Detect encoding of a text file
This command gives you the charset of a text file, which would be handy if you have no idea of the encoding.

Speaking alarm clock
This ran on a ubuntu box using espeak for speaking text with the bash shell. On a mac you should use 'say'. Also you can change your alarm interval and your snooze interval which are currently 8 hours and 1 minute. I would run this via cron yet it's easier to disable if you run it as a command like this :P


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: