Commands by gmajian (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

Change wallpaper

Testing hard disk writing speed

colored tail

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"

Making scripts runs on backgourd and logging output
Save all output to a log.

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
While a dd is running in one terminal, open another and enter the while loop. The sample output will be displayed in the window running the dd and the while loop will exit when the dd is complete. It's possible that a "sudo" will need to be inserted before "pkill", depending on your setup, for example: $ while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO dd; sleep 10; done

Release memory used by the Linux kernel on caches
The Linux kernel uses unused memory in caches. When you execute "free" you never get the "real" available memory.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

generate 30 x 30 matrix
or $ od /dev/urandom -w60 -An|sed 's/ ..../ /g'|head -n 30 (this one lacks digits 8 and 9)

Unlock VMs in Proxmox
Unlock your VMS to avoid problems after some failed tasks ended.

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: