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

regex for turning a URL into a real hyperlink (i.e. for posting somewhere that accepts basic html)
This should work with anything://url.whatever etc etc ;)

Plaintext credentials sniffing with tcpdump and grep
Simple TCPDUMP grepping for common unsafe protocols (HTTP, POP3, SMTP, FTP)

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file

Find the package that installed a command

grab all commandlinefu shell functions into a single file, suitable for sourcing.
Each shell function has its own summary line, as a comment. If there are multiple shell functions with the same name, the function with the highest number of votes is put into the file. Note: added 'grep -v' to the end of the pipeline, to eliminate extraneous lines containing only '--'. Thanks to matthewbauer for pointing this out.

Enable cd by variable names
Usage: $ mydir=/very/long/path/to/a/dir $ cd mydir I often need to cd where no man wants to go (i.e. long path). by enabling the shell option cdable_vars, I can tell cd to assume the destination is the name of a variable.

List users with running processes
This is different that `who` in that who only cares about logged-in users running shells, this command will show all daemon users and what not; also users logged in remotely via SSH but are running SFTP/SCP only and not a shell.

show all key and mouse events
for mousevents, move the mouse over the window and click/move etc. usefull for getting mouseKeys, or keyKeys. also usefull for checking if X gets those mouse-events.

Empty a file
The downside of output redirection is that you need permissions. So something like $ > file won't play nicely w/ sudo. You'd need to do something like $ bash -c '> file' instead, you could go w/ $ sudo truncate -s0 file

Rename files in batch


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: