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

Safe Delete
remove file that has sensitive info safely. Overwrites it 33 times with zeros

Current running process ordered by %CPU
Useful to detect which process is causing system loads. It shows process PID so as we can take further actions.

tcpdump top 10 talkers
capture 2000 packets and print the top 10 talkers

complete extraction of a debian-package
extracts the debian-package $debfile to $extractdir, including all packaging-information. to repack the package, just type: $dpkg-deb -b $extractdir

read unixtimestamp with festival
you will hear how many seconds since 1.1.1970 in english words with billions, millions and thousands. this is very useful, if you want to get over to use the unixtimestamp instead of the 24 hour clock in your dayly life

Download streaming video in mms
require mimms package

Unix alias for date command that lets you create timestamps in ISO 8601 format
I often need to add a timestamp to a file, but I never seem to remember the exact format string that has to be passed to the date command to get a compact datetime string like 20090220T231410 (i.e yyyymmddThhmmss, the ISO 8601 format popular outside the US)

Every Nth line position # (AWK)
A better way to show the file lines 3n + 1

Generate binary sequence data

move a lot of files over ssh
Useful to move many files (thousands or millions files) over ssh. Faster than scp because this way you save a lot of tcp connection establishments (syn/ack packets). If using a fast lan (I have just tested gigabyte ethernet) it is faster to not compress the data so the command would be: tar -cf - /home/user/test | ssh user@sshServer 'cd /tmp; tar xf -'


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: