All commands (14,187)

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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.

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get a random command
This command will show an random command. this is useful if you want to explore various random commands.

Show UDID of iPhone
Display the serial of the iPhone (aka UDID).

Verbosely delete files matching specific name pattern, older than 15 days.

bulk rename files with sed, one-liner
Far from my favorite, but works in sh and with an old sed that doesn't support '-E'

Fork Bomb for Windows
Quick and dirty forkbomb for all flavors of windows Do not use in production. Replace start with a command of your choice, this will just open a new command prompt and is pretty tricky to stop once started

Watch for when your web server returns
If your web server is down, this command will periodically attempt to connect to it. If the output is blank, your server is not yet up. If you see HTML, your server is up. Obviously, you need to replace the Google URL with your web server URL... * 'watch' -- a command for re-executing a command and displaying the output * '-n 15' -- tells watch to redo the command every 15 seconds * 'curl' -- a handy utility for getting the source of a web page * '-s' -- tells curl to be silent about failing * '--connect-timeout 10' -- Try to connect for 10 seconds

Emptying a text file in one shot
Within vi allow to empty a text file in one shot

lotto generator

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"

Take aWebcam Picture When the Mouse Moves
This takes a webcam picture every everytime the mouse is moved (waits 10 seconds between checking for movement) and stores the picture wherever you want it. Ideas: Use in conjunction with a dropbox type application to see who is using your computer Use /dev/input/mice if /dev/input/mouse* doesn't work Use the bones of this to make a simple screensaver


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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.

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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,…):

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