All commands sorted by votes | commandlinefu.com

Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation: Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands: To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner: Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed: Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Terminal - All commands - 12,019 results

du -sh `ls -p | grep /`

2010-04-11 02:53:51

User: sarcilav

Functions: du grep

-1

Up
Down

List complete size of directories (do not consider hidden directories)

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

curl http://my-ip.cc/host.xml

2011-09-01 00:30:03

User: samleb

Tags: Network curl ip address geoip

-1

Up
Down

Get your external IP address

XML version.

Additionally it may give your geolocation if it's known by hostip.info

gunzip -c x.txt.gz >x.txt

2014-10-24 10:00:21

User: zluyuer

Functions: gunzip

-1

Up
Down

Keep gz file after uncompressing

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

cobbler repo add --name=CentOS-5.3-i386-updates --mirror=http://mirror3.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/CentOS/5.3/updates/i386/

2009-04-27 10:18:45

User: w00binda

Tags: cobbler

-1

Up
Down

Create new repo in Cobbler for CentOS 5.3 updates

Add a repo to cobbler. To download all the repository contents the command is:

cobbler reposync

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

cal -y

2009-09-02 12:57:23

User: andrepuel

Functions: cal

-1

Up
Down

Today's date on a yearly calendar...

Show today date on a yearly calendar.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

netstat -lantp | grep -i establ | awk -F/ '{print $2}' | uniq | sort

2009-09-19 13:54:36

User: ktoso

Functions: awk grep netstat uniq

Tags: bash grep netstat internet

-1

Up
Down

Show apps that use internet connection at the moment.

Can be used to discover what programms create internet traffic. Skip the part after awk to get more details.

Has anyone an idea why the uniq doesn't work propperly here (see sample output)?

curl -s "http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=New%20York" | sed 's|.*<temp_f data="$[^"]*$"/>.*|\1|'

2010-02-08 23:06:48

User: matthewbauer

Functions: sed

Tags: google api weather temperature fahrenheit

-1

Up
Down

Weather on the Command line

Will return temperature in Fahrenheit of a location (New York City in example).

Uses a Google API.

cat 1.tar.gz 2.tar.gz | tar zxvif -

2010-05-09 03:50:00

User: psychopenguin

Functions: cat tar

-1

Up
Down

Merge tarballs

You don't need to create an intermediate file, just pipe the output directly to tar command and use stin as file (put a dash after the f flag).

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

function titlescroll { _X=0 _TITLEMSG=$1 _WIDTH=${2:-16} _TITLEMSG=`printf "%$((${#_TITLEMSG}+$_WIDTH))s" "$_TITLEMSG"` while `true` do _X=$(((_X+1)%${#_TITLEMSG})) xtitle "${_TITLEMSG:_X:_WIDTH}" done }

2010-01-12 20:48:46

User: romulusnr

-1

Up
Down

Scroll a message in a terminal titlebar

Usage:

titlescroll "message" <width>

Requires command "xtitle" or replace with:

echo -ne "\e]0;TEXT_HERE\007"

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find ./ -name Thumbs.db -exec rm -rf '{}' +

2010-08-18 02:55:38

User: thameera

Functions: find rm

-1

Up
Down

Remove Thumbs.db files from folders

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

expr $(fdisk -s ` grep ' / ' /etc/mtab |cut -d " " -f1`) / 1024

2009-05-21 17:25:38

User: ncaio

Functions: cut expr fdisk grep

-1

Up
Down

Alternative way to get the root directory size in megabytes

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

> filename

2010-07-16 05:37:33

User: and3k

-1

Up
Down

empty a file

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

locate -i yourfilename | sed 's/ /\\ /g' | xargs ls -lah | less

2011-07-26 13:00:39

User: unixmonkey23919

Functions: locate ls sed xargs

-1

Up
Down

do a full file listing of every file found with locate

Escapes spaces in paths.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

command foo bar | sudo tee /etc/write-protected > /dev/null

2015-02-08 03:58:35

User: adeverteuil

Functions: command sudo tee

Tags: bash sudo tee pipe redirection redirect

-1

Up
Down

Redirect output to a write-protected file with sudo but without sh -c, using tee.

Use tee -a to append.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

mformat -f 1440 A:

2009-12-10 06:51:20

User: eastwind

Functions: mformat

-1

Up
Down

Format a flooppy with windows compatible disk

The 1440 is the number of bytes, and the A: specifies the floppy drive.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ -type f -iname '*.o' -or -iname '*.ko' |grep -i -o '[a-z0-9]*[-|_]*[0-9a-z]*\.ko$' |xargs -I {} echo '# {}' >>/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

2010-01-13 02:12:08

User: paragao

Functions: echo find grep xargs

Tags: kernel Gentoo module

-1

Up
Down

[Gentoo] Input modules, commented, in your module.autoload file

Whenever you compile a new kernel, there are always new modules. The best way to make sure you have the correct modules loaded when you boot is to add all your modules in the modules.autoload file (they will be commented) and uncomment all those modules you need.

Also a good way to keep track of the available modules in your system.

For other distros you may have to change the name of the file to /etc/modprobe.conf

sshmysql() { ssh -L 13306:127.0.0.1:3306 -N $* & }

2011-09-01 10:21:55

User: peterRepeater

Functions: ssh

Tags: mysql ssh function ssh tunnel

-1

Up
Down

Function to bind MySQL hostport to forward remote MySQL connection to localhost.

Create a secure tunnelled connection for access to a remote MySQL database.

For example, connect with MySQL Workbench to root@127.0.0.1:13306.

locale | grep LANG=

2009-12-10 07:24:01

User: eastwind

Functions: grep locale

-1

Up
Down

show your locale language keyboard setting

goyoutube() { d=/path/to/videos p=$d/playlist m=$d/*.mp4 f=$d/*.flv if [ "$1" == 'rand' ]; then ls -1 $m $f | shuf >$p else ls -1t $m $f >$p fi mplayer -geometry 500x400 -playlist $p }

2010-04-11 18:53:49

User: meathive

Functions: ls

-1

Up
Down

Play newest or random YouTube video

newly downloaded videos

goyoutube

random

goyoutube rand

This command assumes you've already downloaded some YouTube .mp4 or .flv video files via other means. Requires 'shuf', or your own stdin shuffler.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

less file.tar.gz

2009-03-15 23:00:05

User: allbad

Functions: less

-1

Up
Down

View the list of files and directories in an archive with less.

This will print out the files and directories in a gzipped tarball.

Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

netstat -nut | awk '$NF=="ESTABLISHED" {print $5}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort -u

2011-07-27 07:24:10

User: bitbasher

Functions: awk cut netstat sort

-1

Up
Down

All IP connected to my host

find all computer connected to my host through TCP connection

find -regextype posix-egrep -regex ".*/[A-Z]{3}_201009[0-9]{2}.*" -printf "%f %s\n" | awk '{ SUM += $2;COUNT++ } END { print SUM/1024 " kb in " COUNT " files" }'

2010-09-21 15:41:45

User: taintedkernel

Functions: awk find

Tags: awk find

-1

Up
Down

Sum up total size and count of all certain filename pattern/regex

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

(cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS; ./firefox-bin -p default --no-remote)

2009-02-18 21:35:02

User: DEinspanjer

Functions: cd

-1

Up
Down

Run a second copy of Firefox using the same profile on Mac OS X

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

killall -s 9 krunner_lock

2009-05-21 22:29:06

User: b2e

Functions: killall

-1

Up
Down

Unlock your KDE4 session remotely (for boxes locked by KDE lock utility)

With this you can unlock your KDE4 session via SSH, via mobile phone SSH or e. g. scheduled task in crontab (without asking password). Useful when you need to grant somebody access to your locked profile remotely.

Create an alias (e. g. as "unlock") and use with remote KDE4 lock.

This works only on KDE4 boxes because KDE 3 is using utility with another name.

Tested on Kubuntu 8.10.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

(echo "plot '-' with lines"; for x in $(seq 1 100); do curl -s "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=$(echo $x bottles of beer on the wall|sed 's/ /%20/g')"|sed 's/.*"estimatedResultCount":"$[^"]*$".*/\1\n/';done)|gnuplot -persist

2010-03-17 21:04:36

User: matthewbauer

Functions: echo sed seq

Tags: google xkcd comic results

-1

Up
Down

x bottles of beer on the wall graph

Will create a graph of the results for "x bottles of beer on the wall".

Requires Gnuplot.

Inspired by an xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/715/

For sample output see: http://tr.im/xbottlesofbeer

‹ First < 409 410 411 412 413 > Last ›