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

Create a random file of a certain, and display progress along the way.
SIZE is the number of gigabytes and the file name is at the end. Random data is generated by encrypting /dev/zero, similar to other techniques posted on here.

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"

Hiding and Show files on Mac OS X
These commands will mark a file as hidden or visible to Mac OS X Finder. Notice the capitol V vs the lowercase v. This will also work for directories. setfile -a V foo.bar; // This marks the file invisible setfile -a v foo.bar; // This marks the file visible I have also found that adding the following aliases are helpful: alias hide='setfile -a V' alias show='setfile -a v'

Random unsigned integer
works at least in bash. returns integer in range 0-32767. range is not as good, but for lots of cases it's good enough.

Sort on multiple dis-contiguous keys/fields (can even specify key number/field from the end)
Notes: 1) -n-1 means sort key is the last field 2) -l is important if each separate record is on a new line (usually so for text files) 3) -j tells msort not to create log file (msort.log) in the working directory 4) may need to install msort package. 5) msort does lot more. Check man msort

create and md5 sum of your password
create and md5 sum of your password without it showing up in your terminal or history. Afterwards we overwrite the $p variable (thx to bazzargh)

Rename files in batch

Checks throughput between two nodes
This will show the throughput between two nodes. Thanks to szboardstretcher, who posted it here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/quick-and-easy-way-to-measure-throughput-between-two-nodes-868998/

Get Your IP Geographic Location with curl and jq

Print text string vertically, one character per line.
Define a function $ vert () { echo $1 | grep -o '.'; } Use it to print some column headers $ paste


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: