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

Rename files in batch

Get My Public IP Address

Merge bash terminal histories

Unlock more space form your hard drive
This command changes the reserved space for privileged process on '/dev/sda' to 1 per cent.

find an unused unprivileged TCP port
Some commands (such as netcat) have a port option but how can you know which ports are unused?

Re-read partition table on specified device without rebooting system (here /dev/sda).

find distro name / release version

Touch a file using a timestamp embedded in the file name.
tstouch takes two arguments: a filename containing a timestamp, and an extended regular expression with the parenthesized section matching a timestamp of the form YYYYMMDDhhmm or YYYYMMDDhhmm.ss. It then touches the file with that timestamp.

do 'foo' until it exits successfully, pausing in between crashes
restart a buggy script when it dies. works great for "git svn fetch", which leaks memory like a sieve and eventually dies...making you restart it.

Change the window title of your xterm
If you are using an xterm emulation capable terminal emulator, such as PuTTY or xterm on Linux desktop, this command will replace the title of that terminal window. I know it is not nice to have seventeen terminals on your desktop with title PuTTY, you can not tell which one is connected to which server and doing what. Even though the string between the quotes is typed as literals, it needs a little more finesse to make it work. Here is how it is done key-by-key: echo "( ctrl-v then ctrl-[ )0;Enter_Title_String_Here( ctrl-v then ctrl-g )"( enter ) ctrl-v : means hold down ctrl key and hit v at the same time like you are pasting in windoze ; also please don't type the parentheses, i.e., ( and )


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: