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

Binary Clock
Binary clock with separate H:M:S.

Plays Music from SomaFM
This command asks for the station name and then connects to somafm, Great for those who have linux home entertainment boxes and ssh enabled on them, just for the CLI fiends out there ( I know I'm one of them ;) Also, don't forget to add this as alias(ie alias somafm="read -p 'Which Station? "; mplayer --reallyquite -vo none -ao sdl http://somafm.com/startstream=${REPLY}.pls")

Generate random valid mac addresses
Ruby version. Also, a perl version: $perl -e 'printf("%.2x.",rand(255))for(1..5);printf("%.2x\n",rand(255))'

Using awk to sum/count a column of numbers.
Takes a input file (count.txt) that looks like: 1 2 3 4 5 It will add/sum the first column of numbers.

LIST FILENAMES OF FILES CREATED TODAY IN CURRENT DIRECTORY
Then pipe to 'xargs ls' for a familiar listing, possibly using find's -print0 and xarg's -0 options.

Quickly Encrypt a file with gnupg and email it with mailx
This is a quick and easy way of encrypting files in a datastream, without ever really creating an output file from gpg. Useful with cron also, when file(s) have to be sent based on a set schedule.

Search for commands from the command line
Search at CommandLineFu.com from your terminal. Get the clfu-seach at http://www.colivre.coop.br/Aurium/CLFUSearch

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"

Short one line while loop that outputs parameterized content from one file to another
There is a common command for outputting a field or list of fields from each line in a file. Why wouldn't you just use cut?

Grep only files matching certain pattern (Advanced)


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: