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

Create a bunch of dummy files for testing
Sometimes I need to create a directory of files to operate on to test out some commandlinefu I am cooking up. The main thing is the range ({1..N}) expansion.

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)

remote-pbzip2 and transfer a directory to local file

list files recursively by size

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Pronounce an English word using Dictionary.com
This one uses dictionary.com

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"

use the real 'rm', distribution brain-damage notwithstanding
The backslash avoids any 'rm' alias that might be present and runs the 'rm' command in $PATH instead. In a misguided attempt to be more "friendly", some Linux distributions (or sites/etc.) alias 'rm' to 'rm -i'. Unfortunately, this trains users to expect that files won't actually be deleted until they okay it. This expectation will fail with catastrophic results when they use other distributions, move to other sites, etc., and doesn't really even work 100% even with the alias. It's too late to fix 'rm', but '\rm' should work everywhere (under bash).

Beep siren
Infinitely plays beeps with sinusoidally changing sound frequency. Ideal for alarm on an event.

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"


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: