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

Check ps output to see if file is running, if not start it
This comes in handy if you have daemons/programs that have potential issues and stop/disappear, etc., can be run in cron to ensure that a program remains up no matter what. Be advised though, if a program did core out, you'd likely want to know why (gdb) so use with caution on production machines.

Find the package that installed a command

Rename files in batch

use vim to get colorful diff output
:q to quit

Open a man page as a PDF in Gnome
Would be better if gnome-open would accept std in Should be doable in KDE - anyone?

list files recursively by size

Connect-back shell using Bash built-ins

Watch how many tcp connections there are per state every two seconds.
slighty shorter

Run bash on top of a vi session (saved or not saved), run multiple commands, instead of one at a time with :!(bashcommand), type exit and [enter] to get back to where you left off in vi.
Helps when I'm editing a script and want to double check some commands without having to exit out of vi multiple times or having to use another terminal session.

Create a bunch of dummy files for testing
Sometimes I need to create a directory of files to operate on to test out some commandlinefu I am cooking up. The main thing is the range ({1..N}) expansion.


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: