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

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:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)
» commands using watch

Hide

News

2012-05-20 - test: test
2012-05-20 - test: test
2012-05-20 - test: test
2012-05-20 - Test tweets: YU not working?

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands using watch

Terminal - Commands using watch - 96 results

watch 'curl -s --location -I http://any.site.or.url | grep -e "$HTTP\|Location$"'

2012-04-23 17:05:29

User: theist

Functions: grep watch

Tags: curl redirect watch

Up
Down

Debug redirects between production reloads

Watches the headers of a curl, following any redirects and printing only the HTTP status and the location of the possible redirects.

watch -n 5 "upower -d | grep energy -A 4"

2012-04-02 22:33:37

User: aidanlinz

Functions: watch

Up
Down

Quick Battery Power Monitor

Convenient to leave running in a yakuake or plasmacon terminal.

For older kernels

watch -n 5 cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state

watch -n 2 command

2012-03-20 19:55:52

User: pranavkn

Functions: watch

Up
Down

Watch command

Repeat command after every 2 secs

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch() { while true; do echo "<Ctrl+V><Ctrl+L>Every 2.0s: $@"; date; eval "$@"; sleep 2; done }

2012-03-07 09:30:15

User: hfs

Functions: echo eval sleep watch

Tags: watch

Up
Down

Poor man's watch: Repeat a command every N seconds

Usage:

watch ls -l

Basic but usable replacement for the "watch" command for those systems which don't have it (e.g. the Solaris I'm trapped on).

Type Ctrl+V to escape the following Ctrl+L which clears the screen. It will be displayed as "^L".

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch() { if [ -z "$1" ]; then echo "usage: watch interval command" return fi sec=$1 shift while test :; do clear; date=$(date); echo -e "Every "$sec"s: $@ \t\t\t\t $date"; echo $@; sleep $sec; done }

2012-02-29 17:10:19

User: kneufeld

Functions: echo return shift sleep test watch

Up
Down

for all who don't have the watch command

allows command to use switches

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -n 1 "echo | sudo iptables -nvL | head -1 | awk '{print \$7}'"

2012-02-21 04:36:46

User: gudie

Functions: watch

Up
Down

see the size of the downloaded traffic

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

sudo watch arp-scan --interface=wlan0 --localnet

2011-12-30 04:23:00

User: ramaxial

Functions: sudo watch

Tags: bash Linux find list ip address wireless ipv4 arp-scan real-time mac address

Up
Down

Find & watch active IP and MAC addresses in a wireless network in real time. (IPv4 only)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -n 1 'ps -aux | sort -nrk 4 | head'

2011-12-05 16:12:31

User: mesuutt

Functions: sort watch

-3

Up
Down

Monitoring which processes most use CPU

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -tn1 'figlet -f slant `date +%T` | cowsay -n -f telebears'

2011-11-25 14:35:01

User: namakukingkong

Functions: watch

Tags: Linux

Up
Down

Realtime clock cowsay

You need to have figlet(for font) and cowsay installed.

Just copy n paste this command and you can see.....

watch -tn1 'date +%T | xargs banner'

2011-11-20 04:46:02

User: kev

Functions: watch xargs

Tags: banner

Up
Down

ascii digital clock

# ### ### # # ### ### # # #

## # # ### # # # # ### ## # #

# # # # ### # # # # ### # # # #

# ### ##### # # #####

# # # ### # # ### # #

##### ### ### # ##### ### ##### #

watch -n1 "ls -p | grep '/$'"

2011-10-26 09:21:27

User: dbykov

Functions: watch

Up
Down

Watching directories

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -n 1 "netstat -ntu | sed '1,2d' | awk '{ print \$6 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k 2"

2011-09-30 09:04:14

User: facecool

Functions: watch

Up
Down

Monitor connection statistics with netstat and watch

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -n1 'netstat -tn | grep -P :22'

2011-09-28 14:47:35

User: danslinky

Functions: grep watch

Up
Down

Monitoring a port connections

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -d -n 5 df

2011-08-24 19:45:36

User: pcphillips

Functions: watch

Up
Down

Watch the disk fill up with change highlighting

If you add the -d flag each difference in the command's output will be highlighted.

I also monitor individual drives by adding them to df. Makes for a nice thin status line that I can shove to the bottom of the monitor.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -n 2 -d '/sbin/ifconfig eth0'

2011-08-16 10:29:34

User: totti

Functions: watch

Tags: Network ifconfig watch

Up
Down

Highlight network TX, RX information change

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -n 1 "/usr/sbin/lsof -p PID |awk '/TCP/{split(\$8,A,\":\"); split(A[2],B,\">\") ; split(B[1],C,\"-\"); print A[1],C[1],B[2], \$9}' | sort | uniq -c"

2011-08-12 19:16:38

User: ideivid

Functions: watch

Tags: monitoring lsof

Up
Down

Monitor incoming connections of proxies and balancers.

Maybe this will help you to monitor your load balancers or reverse proxies if you happen to use them. This is useful to discover TIME OUTS and this will let you know if one or more of your application servers is not connected by checking.

watch !!

2011-07-05 12:50:56

User: wincus

Functions: watch

Tags: bash watch

Up
Down

monitor the last command run

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch vmstat -sSM

2011-06-16 18:02:24

User: 0disse0

Functions: vmstat watch

Tags: vmstat watch

Up
Down

monitor memory usage

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -n 2 netstat -antu

2011-06-02 23:27:33

User: wilbercarmona

Functions: netstat watch

Up
Down

Watch netstat output every 2 seconds

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch 'netstat -anptu |egrep "^Proto|:80 "'

2011-05-18 15:05:52

User: Mozai

Functions: egrep watch

Tags: monitoring netstat watch

Up
Down

Cheap iftop

Shows updated status in a terminal window for connections to port '80' in a human-friendly form. Use 'watch -n1' to update every second, and 'watch -d' to highlight changes between updates.

If you wish for status updates on a port other than '80', always remember to put a space afterwards so that ":80" will not match ":8080".

watch "cat `ls -rcA1 | tail -n1`"

2011-03-25 01:22:05

User: donnoman

Functions: watch

Tags: watch cat queue directory

Up
Down

Watch and cat the last file to enter a directory

Great for watching things like Maildir's or any other queue directory.

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

> /tmp/psup.log; watch "ps up $(pgrep -d, -x nginx) | grep -v STAT | awk '{print $8}' | grep -c [ZUTD] >> /tmp/psup.log; tail -n 22 /tmp/psup.log"

2011-03-16 17:49:23

User: donnoman

Functions: watch

Tags: nginx

-2

Up
Down

Watch for blocked NGINX processes for tuning purposes

This command counts the number of blocked NGINX processes every 2 seconds and shows the last 22 measurements

You should have at least the number of cpu's in a non-blocked state.

The command up to the first ; truncates the log file.

watch -n 1 :

2011-02-16 13:38:37

User: daniele

Functions: watch

Up
Down

Console clock

Clock will appear in the top-right corner

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

watch -t -n1 'date "+%r %F %A"'

2011-02-16 03:05:48

User: oracular

Functions: watch

Tags: date clock watch

Up
Down

Console clock

Shows a simple clock in the console

-t param removes the watch header

Ctrl-c to exit

watch -n1 'date "+%T"'

2011-02-16 00:33:51

User: DaveQB

Functions: watch

Up
Down

Console clock

A console clock with the current time.

1 2 3 > Last ›