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

Show current pathname in title of terminal
This helps to keep track of what is going on when you have several tabs open in your terminal. The title automatically changes when you change directories.

Performance tip: compress /usr/
Periodically run the one-liner above if/when there are significant changes to the files in /usr/ = Before rebooting, add following to /etc/fstab : = $ /squashed/usr/usr.sfs /squashed/usr/ro squashfs loop,ro 0 0 $ usr /usr aufs udba=reval,br:/squashed/usr/rw:/squashed/usr/ro 0 0 No need to delete original /usr/ ! (unless you don't care about recovery). Also AuFS does not work with XFS

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"

Play online music videos in terminal
pvl 'link1' 'link2' 'link3' Play Youtube, Vimeo, etc links without visual elements. Great for music videos when you just want the audio. You can control mplayer with this! Hit Ctrl-C twice to exit (if you're playing multiple files)

all out
How to force a userid to log out of a Linux host, by killing all processes owned by the user, including login shells:

Output as many input
Output of a command as input to many

Find the package that installed a command

Cut/Copy brackets or parentheses on vim (in normal mode)
We have for example : func () { echo FOO echo BAR } Place the cursor under a bracket and press d + %. It will cut everything inside and the brackets. It let : func () You can copy text with y + %

python2 -m CGIHTTPServer
In case you need to test some CGI scripts this does the job. It also has the functionality of a http server. Enjoy!

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file


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: