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

Network Proxy to dump the application level forward traffic in plain text in the console and in a file.
If you have a client that connects to a server via plain text protocol such as HTTP or FTP, with this command you can monitor the messages that the client sends to the server. Application level text stream will be dumped on the command line as well as saved in a file called proxy.txt. You have to change 8080 to the local port where you want your client to connect to. Change also 192.168.0.1 to the IP address of the destination server and 80 to the port of the destination server. Then simply point your client to localhost 8080 (or whatever you changed it to). The traffic will be redirected to host 192.168.0.1 on port 80 (or whatever you changed them to). Any requests from the client to the server will be dumped on the console as well as in the file "proxy.txt". Unfortunately the responses from the server will not be dumped.

Add .gitignore files to all empty directories recursively from your current directory

Grep for regular expression globally, list files and positions.
Grep for expression globally, list files and positions. "Hirn" is a nice german crib meaning "Brain". :-) Afterwards you can edit the line you want with "vi ./p_common/common_main.pbt +1550"

Mortality Countdown
watch the seconds of your life tick away - replace YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:ss w/ your birthtime.

Exclude multiple columns using AWK
Print all columns except the 1st and 3rd.

Quick find function
A function that allows you to perform a case-insensitive search in the current directory, and directories in the current directory (but no further), for files containing the first argument anywhere in their names.

Generate a Random MAC address
Use the following variation for FreeBSD: $ openssl rand 6 | xxd -p | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/:$//'

Shows space used by each directory of the root filesystem excluding mountpoints/external filesystems (and sort the output)

Change the homepage of Firefox
Pros: Works in all Windows computers, most updated and compatible command. Cons: 3 liner Replace fcisolutions.com with your site name.

total text files in current dir


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: