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

Insert commas to make reading numbers easier in the output of ls
This modifies the output of ls so that the file size has commas every three digits. It makes room for the commas by destructively eating any characters to the left of the size, which is probably okay since that's just the "group".   Note that I did not write this, I merely cleaned it up and shortened it with extended regular expressions. The original shell script, entitled "sl", came with this description:    : '  : For tired eyes (sigh), do an ls -lF plus whatever other flags you give  : but expand the file size with commas every 3 digits. Really helps me  : distinguish megabytes from hundreds of kbytes...  :  : Corey Satten, corey@cac.washington.edu, 11/8/89  : '   Of course, some may suggest that fancy new "human friendly" options, like "ls -Shrl", have made Corey's script obsolete. They are probably right. Yet, at times, still I find it handy. The new-fangled "human-readable" numbers can be annoying when I have to glance at the letter at the end to figure out what order of magnitude is even being talked about. (There's a big difference between 386M and 386P!). But with this nifty script, the number itself acts like a histogram, a quick visual indicator of "bigness" for tired eyes. :-)

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"

Quickly generate an MD5 hash for a text string using OpenSSL

find available cpu frequencies on FreeBSD
Once you know the available frequencies for your CPU, they can be used to do things like set minimum CPU frequency for powerd so that it doesn't ramp down too slow on a server : /etc/sysctl.conf or /boot/loader.conf: debug.cpufreq.lowest=DESIRED FREQ HERE or at terminal sysctl debug.cpufreq.lowest=DESIRED FREQ HERE

Clear terminal Screen
Probably the quickest / easiest way to clear the screen.

log your PC's motherboard and CPU temperature along with the current date
Uses the data in the /proc system, provided by the acpid, to find out the CPU temperature. Can be run on systems without lm-sensors installed as well.

Email an svn dump
Dumps a compressed svn backup to a file, and emails the files along with any messages as the body of the email

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"

pretend to be busy in office to enjoy a cup of coffee

Print Memory Utilization Percentage For a specific process and it's children
Change the name of the process and what is echoed to suit your needs. The brackets around the h in the grep statement cause grep to skip over "grep httpd", it is the equivalent of grep -v grep although more elegant.


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: