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

backup system over ssh, exlucde common dirs

How to backup hard disk timely?
Creates files in $DATE and hardlinks existing files to $PREVDATE. Thus full backup in each directory. Only drawback is changed modification time. Recommend a wrapper script to determine $DATE and $PREVDATE. Works like a charm. (Dirvish handrolled)

Enter parameter if empty (script becomes interactive when parameters are missing)
Can be used for command line parameters too. If you have a more complicated way of entering values (validation, GUI, ...), then write a function i.e. EnterValue() that echoes the value and then you can write: $ param=${param:-$(EnterValue)}

find the longest command in your history

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Target a specific column for pattern substitution
Awk replaces every instance of foo with bar in the 5th column only.

Delete C style comments using vim

Find the processes that are on the runqueue. Processes with a status of
Want to know why your load average is so high? Run this command to see what processes are on the run queue. Runnable processes have a status of "R", and commands waiting on I/O have a status of "D". On some older versions of Linux may require -emo instead of -eo. On Solaris: ps -aefL -o s -o user -o comm | egrep "^O|^R|COMMAND"

Pull Total Memory Usage In Virtual Environment
This command basically adds up all of the individual instances processes and gives you a grand total for used memory in that instance alone.

Add existing user to a group


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: