Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 11,174 results
awk '{if (NR == 3) print}' <file>
2009-10-19 15:58:09
User: yooreck
Functions: awk
-5
Up
Down
To print a specific line from a file

I don't know if it's better but works fine :)

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
gawk '{n=$1;a=0;b=1;c=1;for(i=1;i<n;i++){c=a+b;a=b;b=c};print c}' << eof
2010-11-26 08:36:30
User: unixmonkey13930
Functions: gawk
Tags: awk
-5
Up
Down
Fibonacci numbers with awk

only take the first field on each row to compute the fibo on this number

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -name "*.c" -exec sed -i "/\/sh/a\####################################\n#Date:2010-05-18\n#Company:XXXXX tech Co.\n#Author:Wangjunling\n#Copyright:gpl\n####################################" {} \;
2010-05-18 03:08:47
User: yogoloth
Functions: find sed
-5
Up
Down
bat add copyright info
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
iptables -F
2009-02-16 13:09:36
User: Russell
Functions: iptables
-5
Up
Down
Delete all firewall rules in a chain or all chains
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
removedir(){ read -p "Delete the current directory $PWD ? " human;if [ "$human" = "yes" ]; then [ -z "${PWD##*/}" ] && { echo "$PWD not set" >&2;return 1;}; rm -Rf ../"${PWD##*/}"/ && cd ..; else echo "I'm watching you" | pv -qL 10; fi; }
2010-01-20 08:01:21
User: oshazard
Functions: cd echo read rm
Tags: bash
-5
Up
Down
Remove current directory (REVISED)

Credit goes to "eightmillion"

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
say `cat /path/to/textfile.txt`
2009-08-18 19:41:42
User: eponafries
-5
Up
Down
Read aloud a text file in Mac OS X
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
p=$(netstat -nate 2>/dev/null | awk '/LISTEN/ {gsub (/.*:/, "", $4); if ($4 == "4444") {print $8}}'); for i in $(ls /proc/|grep "^[1-9]"); do [[ $(ls -l /proc/$i/fd/|grep socket|sed -e 's|.*\[\(.*\)\]|\1|'|grep $p) ]] && cat /proc/$i/cmdline && echo; done
2009-04-30 12:39:48
User: j0rn
Functions: awk cat grep ls netstat sed
Tags: sed awk ls grep netstat
-5
Up
Down
netstat -p recoded (totaly useless..)

Ok so it's rellay useless line and I sorry for that, furthermore that's nothing optimized at all...

At the beginning I didn't managed by using netstat -p to print out which process was handling that open port 4444, I realize at the end I was not root and security restrictions applied ;p

It's nevertheless a (good ?) way to see how ps(tree) works, as it acts exactly the same way by reading in /proc

So for a specific port, this line returns the calling command line of every thread that handle the associated socket

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
netstat -nlput
2013-05-09 08:15:04
User: techie
Functions: netstat
-5
Up
Down
Prints tcp and udp connections
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -O - -q http://whatismyip.org/
2011-10-15 11:36:56
User: ztank1013
Functions: wget
-5
Up
Down
Get your external IP address

This just output your external IP, no extra characters at the end of line.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
vim +143 filename.txt
2013-05-09 08:24:28
User: techie
Functions: vim
Tags: vim
-5
Up
Down
Go to a specified line in a file
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
man <command> then type h
2011-10-16 09:49:56
User: stanix
Functions: man type
Tags: man search navigate
-5
Up
Down
Learn searching and navigating in man like a boss

Read all chapters up to 'Jumping', improve your effectiveness of wirking in terminal.

Most useful are the Moving and Searching commands

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
watch 'ls -tr1 | tail -n1 | xargs tail'
2013-05-09 11:37:59
User: batandwa
Functions: tail watch xargs
Tags: tail ls xargs watch
-5
Up
Down
Poll and print end of lates modified file

Watches for file modifications in the current directory and tails the file.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
df -h
2009-07-08 11:25:28
User: Paaskehare
Functions: df
-5
Up
Down
Show the amount of space left on mounted harddrives

Bulit-in function in linux, so should work on any linux distribution.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
udhcpc -i eth0
2012-09-18 10:36:46
User: huazhihao
-5
Up
Down
obtain ip
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
zip -r -9 /var/www/html/project.zip /var/www/html/project
2010-01-22 16:51:11
User: svnlabs
-5
Up
Down
Project Zipped

Project Zipped

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
date | md5sum
2010-09-28 20:20:17
User: yababay
Functions: date
Tags: tr fold
-5
Up
Down
Generate a random password 32 characters long :)
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type d -name 'CVS' | xargs rm -r
2011-08-10 07:38:51
User: kev
Functions: find rm xargs
Tags: find
-5
Up
Down
remove all CVS directories
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -1 static/images/ | while read line; do echo -n $line' '[; grep -rc $line *|grep -v ".svn"|cut -d":" -f2|grep -vc 0| tr "\n" -d; echo -n ]; echo ; done
2009-03-20 20:33:36
User: psytek
Functions: cut echo grep ls read tr
Tags: unix clean project static
-5
Up
Down
Recursively grep a subdirectory for a list of files

This command will grep the entire directory looking for any files containing the list of files. This is useful for cleaning out your project of old static files that are no longer in use. Also ignores .svn directories for accurate counts. Replace 'static/images/' with the directory containing the files you want to search for.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
while true; do ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr:"; sleep 60; done;
2009-04-01 19:29:28
User: bandit36
Functions: grep ifconfig sleep
Tags: script while loop
-5
Up
Down
Periodically loop a command

You can use this to loop any command to periodically see the output.

while true; do [YOUR COMMAND HERE]; sleep [# of seconds]; done;

Alternatively, you can put it in a simple shell script to save typing!

#/!bin/bash

while true; do $1; sleep $2; done;

/path/to/script.sh "ifconfig eth0 | grep 'inet addr:'" 60
Show sample output | Comments (8) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
scp /home/svnlabs.txt root@92.178.0.56:/home/
2010-01-22 21:19:37
User: bakhru
Functions: scp
Tags: a2zfa file cop
-5
Up
Down
Upload file to remote server using SCP
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
set colsep "{char}"
2011-04-05 10:48:48
User: EBAH
Functions: set
Tags: oracle
-5
Up
Down
Oracle: set column separator

set colsep "&TAB" -- for tab separator

set colsep "|" -- for pipe separator

etc...

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
du -sh some/directory
2010-02-21 02:08:28
User: Jacolyte
Functions: du
-5
Up
Down
Show the size of a directory

Displays only the subtotal size of a directory with the -s option, and in human readable format.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ssh -X johndoe@123.456.789
2011-05-19 21:28:25
User: evandrix
Functions: ssh
-5
Up
Down
3 Simple Steps to X11 Forward on Mac OS X

To start X11 display only on your local machine: xeyes &

Extensions to basic command: ssh -X -f user@remotehost xcalc -bg black -fg green

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
xdg-open http://xkcd.com/
2010-08-25 19:14:11
User: unixmonkey8024
Tags: bash curl function browser xkcd comic webcomic
-5
Up
Down
View the newest xkcd comic.

KISS

To get a random xkcd comic:

xdg-open http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
psg() { ps aux | grep "[${1[1]}]${1[2,-1]}"; }
2009-09-07 04:37:11
User: jedahan
Functions: grep ps
-5
Up
Down
Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one

alias ps?='psg' for maximum hawtness. Works in bash or zsh.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate