Commands by uschrisf (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

Suppress output of loud commands you don't want to hear from

Get the 10 biggest files/folders for the current direcotry
This command simply outputs 10 files in human readable, that takes most space on your disk in current directory.

list files recursively by size

bash screensaver (scrolling ascii art with customizable message)
Displays a scrolling banner which loops until you hit Ctrl-C to terminate it. Make sure you finish your banner message with a space so it will loop nicely.

Bare Metal IRC Client
Uses the extremely cool utilities netcat and expect. "expect" logs in & monitors for server PING checks. When a PING is received it sends the PONG needed to stay connected. IRC commands to try: HELP, TIME, MOTD, JOIN and PRIVMSG The "/" in front of IRC commands are not needed, e.g. type JOIN #mygroup Learn about expect: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue48/fisher.html The sample output shows snippets from an actual IRC session. Please click UP button if you like it!

check open ports without netstat or lsof

extract email addresses from some file (or any other pattern)

Number of CPU's in a system
this works for a Linux based system, other UNIX systems may have other way(s) to check the number of CPUs.

live ssh network throughput test
connects to host via ssh and displays the live transfer speed, directing all transferred data to /dev/null needs pv installed Debian: 'apt-get install pv' Fedora: 'yum install pv' (may need the 'extras' repository enabled)

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: