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

Display a block of text with AWK
I find this terribly useful for grepping through a file, looking for just a block of text. There's "grep -A # pattern file.txt" to see a specific number of lines following your pattern, but what if you want to see the whole block? Say, the output of "dmidecode" (as root): $ dmidecode | awk '/Battery/,/^$/' Will show me everything following the battery block up to the next block of text. Again, I find this extremely useful when I want to see whole blocks of text based on a pattern, and I don't care to see the rest of the data in output. This could be used against the '/etc/securetty/user' file on Unix to find the block of a specific user. It could be used against VirtualHosts or Directories on Apache to find specific definitions. The scenarios go on for any text formatted in a block fashion. Very handy.

Colorized grep in less
Get your colorized grep output in less(1). This involves two things: forcing grep to output colors even though it's not going to a terminal and telling less to handle those properly.

Short one line while loop that outputs parameterized content from one file to another

Mouse Tracking
Will track your mouse and save it to a file. You can use gnuplot to graph it: $ gnuplot -persist

archlinux: find more commands provided by the package owning some command
uses the pkgfile command (part of the community repository), highly suggested.

old man's advice

Lines per second in a log file
Another way of counting the line output of tail over 10s not requiring pv. Cut to have the average per second rate : tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 10; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2 You can also enclose it in a loop and send stderr to /dev/null : while true; do tail -n0 -f access.log>/tmp/tmp.log & sleep 2; kill $! ; wc -l /tmp/tmp.log | cut -c-2; done 2>/dev/null

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"

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Go to directory or creat it and go to
For use in scripts this command is very usefull


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: