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

Convert JSON to YAML (unicode safe)
If you tried the other Python version of Convert JSON to YAML and you end up with lines that has "!!python/unicode", this version of the command is for you.

Redirect bash built-in output to stdout
I've had a horrible time trying to pipe the output of some shell built-ins like 'time' to other programs. The built-in doesn't output to stdout or stderr most of the time but using the above will let you pipe the output to something else.

Remove all files previously extracted from a tar(.gz) file.

Scan all open ports without any required program

monitor network traffic and throughput in real time
see http://iptraf.seul.org/ for all kinds of documentation and screenshots

Insert the last argument of the previous command
for example if you did a: $ ls -la /bin/ls then $ ls !$ is equivalent to doing a $ ls /bin/ls

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"

Start dd and show progress every X seconds

extract column from csv file
extracts the 5th column using the delimiter ','

Create subdirectory and move files into it
With this form you dont need to cut out target directory using grep/sed/etc.


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: