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

Get your IP addresses
Shows the interface and the ip-address

Avoid killing the X server with CTRL+C on the tty it was started from

github push-ing behind draconian proxies!
If you are behind a restrictive proxy/firewall that blocks port 22 connections but allows SSL on 443 (like most do) then you can still push changes to your github repository. Your .ssh/config file should contain: Host * ForwardX11 no TCPKeepAlive yes ProtocolKeepAlives 30 ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/proxytunnel -v -p -d %h:443 Host User git Hostname ssh.github.com ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa IdentitiesOnly yes Basically proxytunnel "tunnels" your ssh connection through port 443. You could also use corkscrew or some other tunneling program that is available in your distro's repository. PS: I generally use "github.com" as the SSH-HOST so that urls of the kind git@github.com:USER/REPO.git work transparently :) You

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

Change every instance of OLD to NEW in file FILE
Very quick way to change a word in a file. I use it all the time to change variable names in my PHP scripts (sed -i 's/$oldvar/$newvar/g' index.php)

List docker volumes by container

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

tell if a port is in use
if you don't do --numeric-ports, netstat will try to resolve them to names

Remove orphaned dependencies on Arch
-Qdt Lists dependencies/packages which are no longer required by any packages -q Output only package name (not the version number) -R Remove package(s) Rest is self-explanatory. I just started out with Arch - so if there is any better/standard method to achieve the same - please suggest.

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
For some reason the 2&>1 does not work for me, but the shorter stdout/stderr redirection >& works perfectly (Ubuntu 10.04).


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: