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

Sort files in folders alphabetically
Creates one letter folders in the current directory and moves files with corresponding initial in the folder.

Recursively grep for string and format output for vi(m)
This is a big time saver for me. I often grep source code and need to edit the findings. A single highlight of the mouse and middle mouse click (in gnome terminal) and I'm editing the exact line I just found. The color highlighting helps interpret the data.

backup system over ssh, exlucde common dirs

Filter IP's in apache access logs based on use
The first sort is necessary for ips in a list to be actually unique.

Retrieve the size of a file on a server
- Where $URL is the URL of the file. - Replace the $2 by $3 at the end to get a human-readable size. Credits to svanberg @ ArchLinux forums for original idea. Edit: Replaced command with better version by FRUiT. (removed unnecessary grep)

List open TCP/UDP ports

Returns the number of cores in a linux machine.
Original article in http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/display-number-of-processors-on-linux/

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"

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Dump root ext3 fs over ssh
...can do similar w/ tar, dd, xfsdump, e2fsdump, 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: