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

Gets the X11 Screen resolution
Requires xrandr, grep and, sed.

change dinosaur poop into gold
if firefox is running the database is locked, so you need to copy the places.sqlite file temporarily somewhere to be able to query it...

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Uniformly correct filenames in a directory
Useful if non-ascii characters in filenames have been improperly encoded. Replace "PROBLEM" with the incorrect characters (e.g. 'é'), and "FIX" with the correct ones (e.g. '?').

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"

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Pause Current Thread
Hold ctrl and press z to pause the current thread. Run $fg to resume it.

View all new log messages in real time with color

Find files recursively that were updated in the last hour ignoring SVN files and folders.
Find files recursively that were updated in the last hour ignoring SVN files and folders. Incase you do a full svn up on accident.

Compare a remote dir with a local dir
You can compare directories on two different remote hosts as well: $ diff -y


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: