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

Simple addicting bash game.
hold period (or whatever character) and hit enter after a second. You need to make the next line of periods the same length as the previous line... score starts at 0 and increase each time length of line is same.

Speaking alarm clock
This ran on a ubuntu box using espeak for speaking text with the bash shell. On a mac you should use 'say'. Also you can change your alarm interval and your snooze interval which are currently 8 hours and 1 minute. I would run this via cron yet it's easier to disable if you run it as a command like this :P

Create strong, but easy to remember password
Why remember? Generate! Up to 48 chars, works on any unix-like system (NB: BSD use md5 instead of md5sum)

Scan a gz file for non-printable characters and display each line number and line that contains them.
Scans the file once to build a list of line numbers that contain non-printable characters Scans the file again, passing those line numbers to sed as two commands to print the line number and the line itself. Also passes the output through a tr to replace the characters with a ?

Should I be sleeping?

Empty Bind9 cache
Occasionally, to force zone updating, cache flush is necessary. The use of this command is better than restart the Bind9 process.

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX

List all information about all files (in current dir)
This is a funny usage of the traditional command ls. It could be basically simplified as: $ ls -a -l Duplicating arguments is permitted: $ ls -a -l -l And this markup could be shortened as: $ ls -al Extra note: To view filesizes like a pro, pray for your God: $ ls -allah

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.

Check the status of a network interface


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: