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

Monitor memory usage
Monitor with watch command and vmstat, memory usage

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Continuously listen on a port and respond with a fixed message with netcat (and respond to kill signals)
`while true`: do forever `nc -l -p 4300 -c 'echo hello'`: this is the but anything can go here really `test $? -gt 0 && break`: this checks the return code for ctrl^c or the like and quite the loop, otherwise in order to kill the loop you'd have to get the parent process id and kill it.

one-liner mpc track changer using dmenu
Add a [fluxbox] binding in your key file then this command provides a dmenu selector for the next track to play

Search replace with Ansible style timestamps
$ ls httpd.conf httpd.conf.2015-07-22@14:43:20

loop over a set of items that contain spaces
If you want to operate on a set of items in Bash, and at least one of them contains spaces, the `for` loop isn't going to work the way you might expect. For example, if the current dir has two files, named "file" and "file 2", this would loop 3 times (once each for "file", "file", and "2"): $ for ITEM in `ls`; do echo "$ITEM"; done Instead, use a while loop with `read`: $ ls | while read ITEM; do echo "$ITEM"; done

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Rescan partitions on a SCSI device
Used this after cloning a disk with dd to make the newly written partitions show up in /dev/

View internet connection activity in a browser
The output of lsof is piped to txt2html which converts it to html. # Perl module HTML::TextToHTML needed

Grep log between range of minutes
Returns logs between HH:M[Mx-My], for example, between 13:40 and 13:45.


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: