Commands by agony (1)

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

Speaking alarm clock
This ran on a ubuntu box using espeak for speaking text with the bash shell. On a mac you should use 'say'. Also you can change your alarm interval and your snooze interval which are currently 8 hours and 1 minute. I would run this via cron yet it's easier to disable if you run it as a command like this :P

Find out the last times your system was rebooted (for the duration of wtmp).

Print number of mb of free ram
Here we instead show a more real figure for how much free RAM you have when taking into consideration buffers that can be freed if needed. Unix machines leave data in memory but marked it free to overwrite, so using the first line from the "free" command will mostly give you back a reading showing you are almost out of memory, but in fact you are not, as the system can free up memory as soon as it is needed. I just noticed the free command is not on my OpenBSD box.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

concatenate compressed and uncompressed logs
with zcat force option it's even simpler.

Export all Mailman mailing lists Members to separate .txt files
Export all Mailman mailing lists Members to separate .txt files excluding "Mailman" and "Test" or add yours by && $1!="myDontWannaList"

Get mouse location (X,Y coordinates)

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"

Generate pretty secure random passwords
These are my favourite switches on pwgen: -B Don't include ambiguous characters in the password -n Include at least one number in the password -y Include at least one special symbol in the password -c Include at least one capital letter in the password It just works! Add a number to set password length, add another to set how many password to output. Example: pwgen -Bnyc 12 20 this will output 20 password of 12 chars length.

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: