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

Display IP adress of the given interface in a most portable and reliable way. That should works on many platforms.
Thanks to comment if that works or not... If you have already typed that snippet or you know you already have IO::Interface::Simple perl module, you can type only the last command : $ perl -e 'use IO::Interface::Simple; my $ip=IO::Interface::Simple->new($ARGV[0]); print $ip->address,$/;' ( The first perl command will install the module if it's not there already... )

Look at your data as a greymap image.
Keep width to a power of 2 to see patterns emerge. 512 is good. So is 4096 for huge maps. PNM headers are super basic. http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbm.html

execute a shell with netcat without -e
Shorter version with proper stderr redirection .

Comment out a line in a file
This will comment out a line, specified by line number, in a given file.

Exclude svn directories with grep
exclude-dir option requires grep 2.5.3

Quickly analyse an Apache error log
This searches the Apache error_log for each of the 5 most significant Apache error levels, if any are found the date is then cut from the output in order to sort then print the most common occurrence of each error.

Convert records in columns to csv

Output files without comments or empty lines
Filter comments and empty lines in files. I find this very useful when trying to find what values are actually set in a very long example config file. I often set an alias for it, like : alias nocomment='grep -v "^\($\|#\)"'

list files recursively by size

awk date convert
Convert readable date/time with `date` command


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: