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

Clear ARP table in linux.
Clears the "arp" table, without entering manually addresses (tested in Ubuntu).

Get the size of all the directories in current directory (Sorted Human Readable)
This allows the output to be sorted from largest to smallest in human readable format.

Decrypt passwords from Google Chrome and Chromium.
Read this before you down voting and comment that it is not working -> Wont work on latest versions ~75> since database file is locked and has to be decrypted. This is useful if you have an old hdd with a chrome installation and want to decrypt your old passwords fast.

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"

grep (or anything else) many files with multiprocessor power
xargs -P N spawns up to N worker processes. -n 40 means each grep command gets up to 40 file names each on the command line.

for newbies, how to get one line info about all /bin programs
Get simple description on each file from /bin dir, in list form, usefull for newbies.

Chrome sucks

Mouse Tracking
Will track your mouse and save it to a file. You can use gnuplot to graph it: $ gnuplot -persist

Set name of windows in tmux/byobu to hostnames of servers you're connected to
*I run this with byobu as as a custom status bar entry that runs every 10 seconds by putting it in a script here: $ .byobu/bin/10_update_windows There's no output to stdout, so nothing is displayed on the status bar. *Presumes that #{pane_title} is set to the hostname or prompt containing the host name. In my case, it's in this format: $ $USER@$HOSTNAME:$PWD The sed commands may need to be modified if your pane_title is different. *If you want to strip out a common part of a hostname, add the following before '| uniq' $ -e 's/[COMMON PART]//' I use that to strip out the domain of the servers I connect to, leaving the subdomain.

Easy way to scroll up und down to change to one of n last visited directories.
This alias is meant to append n (here is n=10) most recently used cd commands to the bottom of history file. This way you can easily change to one of previous visited directories simply by hitting 1-10 times arrow up key. Hint: You can make more aliases implying the same rule for any set of frequently used long and complex commands like: mkisof, rdesktop, gpg...


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: