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

Get the IP address of a machine. Just the IP, no junk.
Why use many different utilities all piped together, when you only need two?

Update program providing a functionality on Debian
On Debian systems, choose which command provides java. Works for all alternatives listed in /etc/alternatives.

List all active access_logs for currently running Apache or Lighttpd process
Ever logged into a *nix box and needed to know which webserver is running and where all the current access_log files are? Run this one liner to find out. Works for Apache or Lighttpd as long as CustomLog name is somewhat standard. HINT: works great as input into for loop, like this: $ for i in `lsof -p $(netstat -ltpn|awk '$4 ~ /:80$/ {print substr($7,1,index($7,"/")-1)}')| awk '$9 ~ /access.log$/ {print $9| "sort -u"}'` ; do echo $i; done Very useful for triage on unfamiliar servers!

Tail a log-file over the network
Netcat is used to serve a log-file over a network on port 1234. Point a browser to the specified server/port combo to view log-file updates in real-time.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Run skype using your GTK theme
I use this to make skype blend better into my desktop :) --disable-cleanlooks might not be nescessary to achieve the wanted effect.

Read funny developer comments in the Linux source tree
These are way better than fortune(6).

prettier "cal" command
Displays the same output as "cal", but with the current day highlighted (probably dependent on gnu grep, as I'm not sure other grep's support the "--color=auto" option). Tested and working on Ubuntu 11 and OSX Lion.

Bulk renames with find, sed and a little escaping
This command is a more flexible than my previous submission. It will work with spaces however suuuuper hacky and ugly. Source: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/146173-find-rename-files-using-find-mv-sed.html

Sort processes by CPU Usage
Short list about top 10 processes, sorted by CPU usage


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: