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

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"

Safe Delete
remove file that has sensitive info safely. Overwrites it 33 times with zeros

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Display all shell functions set in the current shell environment
Uses the shell builtin `declare` with the '-f' flag to output only functions to grep out only the function names. You can use it as an alias or function like so: alias shfunctions="builtin declare -f | command grep --color=never -E '^[a-zA-Z_]+\ \(\)'" shfunctions () { builtin declare -f | command grep --color=never -E '^[a-zA-Z_]+\ \(\)'; }

watch iptables counters
Watch the number of packets/bytes coming through the firewall. Useful in setting up new iptables rules or chains. Use this output to reorder rules for efficiency.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

Create date-based tgz of current dir, runs in the background, very very cool
This is freaking sweet!!! Here is the full alias, (I didn't want to cause display problems on commandlinefu.com's homepage): $ alias tarred='( ( D=`builtin pwd`; F=$(date +$HOME/`sed "s,[/ ],#,g"

Find the package that installed a command

Renaming a file without overwiting an existing file name
Sometimes in a hurry you may move or copy a file using an already existent file name. If you aliased the cp and mv command with the -i option you are prompted for a confirmation before overwriting but if your aliases aren't there you will loose the target file! The -b option will force the mv command to check if the destination file already exists and if it is already there a backup copy with an ending ~ is created.


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: