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

Change pidgin status
Changes pidgin status using its dbus interface. The status code can be obtained using command #4543.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Create POSIX tar archive
tar(1) and cpio(1) are not fully platform agnostic, although their file formats are specified in POSIX.1-2001. As such, GNU tar(1) might not be able to extract a BSD tar(1) archive, and ivce versa. pax(1) is defined in POSIX.1-2001. To extract an archive: $ pax -rf archive.tar

Get the SAN (subjectAltName) of a site's certificate.
Based on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13127352/checking-alternative-names-for-a-san-ssl-cert Replace "facebook.com" with the desired hostname.

RTFM function
Sometimes you don't have man pages only '-h' or '--help'.

Copy the full path of a file to the clipboard (requires xclip or similar)
Handy for those times you need to paste a file path in an IDE or some other app. sudo apt-get install xclip Then, for convenience, alias xclip to 'xclip -selection c' so you can just do something like realpath . | xclip

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Get all IPs via ifconfig
works on Linux and Solaris. I think it will work on nearly all *nix-es

Tar - Compress by excluding folders
If you give tar a list of filenames, it will not add the directories, so if you don't care about directory ownership or permissions, you can save some space. Tar will create directories as necessary when extracting. This command is limited by the maximum supported size of the argument list, so if you are trying to tar up the whole OS for instance, you may just get "Argument list too long".

Dump sqlite database to plain text format
If you want edit your sqlite database in any uft8 supported editor, you can dump whole sqlite database to plain text.


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: