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

list files recursively by size

Quickly graph a list of numbers
Useful when you've produced a large file of numbers, and want to quickly see the distribution. The value of y halfway along the x axis is the median. Simple! Just create the listOfNumbers.txt file with a number on each line to try it out.

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"

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
This version uses netcat to check a particular service.

Rename files in batch

Make a zip file with date/time created in the name of the file , zip all sub-directorys
zip -r /tmp/filename-`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`.zip /directory/

Execute a command on multiple hosts in parallel
Ssh to host1, host2, and host3, executing on each host and saving the output in {host}.log. I don't have the 'parallel' command installed, otherwise it sounds interesting and less cryptic.

Find number of computers in domain, OU, etc .

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Make changes in .bashrc immediately available
You may want to just use the shortcut "." instead of "source"


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: