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

List all files/folders in working directory with their total size in Megabytes

Remove Backup Files
Remove all text backup files.

faster version of ls *
I know its not much but is very useful in time consuming scripts (cron, rc.d, etc).

Setting global redirection of STDERR to STDOUT in a script
You have a script where =ALL= STDERR should be redirected to STDIN and you don't want to add "2>&1" at the end of each command... E.G.: $ ls -al /foo/bar 2>&1 Than just add this piece of code at the beginning of your script! I hope this can help someone. :)

Output a SSL certificate start or end date
A quick and simple way of outputting the start and end date of a certificate, you can simply use 'openssl x509 -in xxxxxx.crt -noout -enddate' to output the end date (ex. notAfter=Feb 01 11:30:32 2009 GMT) and with the date command you format the output to an ISO format. For the start date use the switch -startdate and for end date use -enddate.

True random passwords using your microphone noise as seed
Generate a truly random password using noise from your microphone to seed the RNG. This will spit out 12 password with 12 characters each, but you can save this into a bash script and replace 'pwgen -ys 12 12' with 'pwgen $@' so you can pass any paramters to pwgen as you would normally do.

Remove a line from a file using sed (useful for updating known SSH server keys when they change)
remove the host for the .ssh/know_host file

A formatting test for David Winterbottom: improving commandlinefu for submitters
Commandlinefu.com is great but has a few bugs when people are submitting new commands: . 1. There is no preview button. This was a minor inconvenience before, but now is a major problem since new commands won't show up to be edited until they have been moderated. . 2. White space in the description field and in the comments is almost completely lost. People resort to using periods in between paragraphs to force a line break. Indentation of code is ridiculous. . 3. Many characters get munged. . 3a. For example, a less than character in the description gets read as an HTML tag and discarded. In order to type a less than, I've had to type "<" (I hope that comes out right). Unfortunately, when re-editing a command, the HTML entity is turned into a literal less than character, which I have to change back by hand before saving. 3b. Some unicode characters work in the description field, but turn into ugly literal HTML strings when put in the sample output or in an additional command using the $ prefix. . For example, here is a unicode character: ❥ $ Here is the same character after a dollar sign: ❥ . 3c. Some unicode characters don't work anywhere. Bizarrely, it appears to be the most commonly needed ones, such as Latin-1 accented characters. Here are some examples, . Bullet: ?, Center dot: ?, Umlaut u: ?. . 4. Here is an example of the greater than, >, and less than,

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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: