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

move you up one directory quickly
Alias a single character 'b' to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Using "cd .." is one of the most repetitive sequence of characters you'll in the command line. Bring it down to two keys 'b' and 'enter'. It stands for "back" Also useful to have multiple: alias b='cd ../' alias bb='cd ../../' alias bbb='cd ../../../' alias bbbb='cd ../../../../'

Connect to SMTP server using STARTTLS
Allows you to connect to an SMTP server over TLS, which is useful for debugging SMTP sessions. (Much like telnet to 25/tcp). Once connected you can manually issue SMTP commands in the clear (e.g. EHLO)

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Find files and list them sorted by modification time
This uses the ability of find (at least the one from GNU findutils that is shiped with most linux distros) to display change time as part of its output. No xargs needed.

generate a randome 10 character password

Sort a character string
Sorts a character string, using common shell commands.

commentate specified line of a file
used when modify several configuration files with a single command

What is the use of this switch ?
Find the usage of a switch with out searching through the entire man page. Usage: manswitch [cmd] [switch] Eg: $manswitch grep silent ____________________________ In simple words $man | grep "\-" Eg: $man grep | grep "\-o" This is not a standard method but works.

Display summary of git commit ids and messages for a given branch
In color. Additionally you may define in your ~/.gitconfig and run it just as 'git one': one = log --pretty='format:%Cgreen%H %Cred%ai %Creset- %s'

Forwards connections to your port 2000 to the port 22 of a remote host via ssh tunnel


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: