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

Compress and store the image of a disk over the network
Create an image of "device" and send it to another machine through the network ("target" and "port" sets the ip and port the stream will be sent to), outputting a progress bar On the machine that will receive, compress and store the file, use: $nc -l -p | 7z a -si -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -ms=on Optionally, add the -v4g switch at the end of the line in order to split the file every 4 gigabytes (or set another size: accepted suffixes are k, m and g). The file will be compressed using 7z format, lzma2 algorithm, with maximum compression level and solid file activated. The compression stage will be executed on the machine which will store the image. It was planned this way because the processor on that machine was faster, and being on a gigabit network, transfering the uncompressed image wasn't much of a problem.

Sort files in folders alphabetically
Creates one letter folders in the current directory and moves files with corresponding initial in the folder.

Check if a process is running
Send signal 0 to the process. The return status ($?) can be used to determine if the process is running. 0 if it is, non-zero otherwise.

Colorful man
That command installs "most" and make this command as the default man reader. The "most" works like "less" (the current man reader), but it render colors for manpages and may do more things. Read "man most". You can see a preview here: http://www.dicas-l.com.br/dicas-l/20090718.php

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Yet another way to add a line at the top a of text file with the help of the tac command (reverse cat).

Function to check whether a regular file ends with a newline
tail -c 1 "$1" returns the last byte in the file. Command substitution deletes any trailing newlines, so if the file ended in a newline $(tail -c 1 "$1") is now empty, and the -z test succeeds. However, $a will also be empty for an empty file, so we add -s "$1" to check that the file has a size greater than zero. Finally, -f "$1" checks that the file is a regular file -- not a directory or a socket, etc.

View advanced Sort options, Quick Reference Help Alias
Once you get into advanced/optimized scripts, functions, or cli usage, you will use the sort command alot. The options are difficult to master/memorize however, and when you use sort commands as much as I do (some examples below), it's useful to have the help available with a simple alias. I love this alias as I never seem to remember all the options for sort, and I use sort like crazy (much better than uniq for example). # Sorts by file permissions $ find . -maxdepth 1 -printf '%.5m %10M %p\n' | sort -k1 -r -g -bS 20% 00761 drwxrw---x ./tmp 00755 drwxr-xr-x . 00701 drwx-----x ./askapache-m 00644 -rw-r--r-- ./.htaccess # Shows uniq history fast $ history 1000 | sed 's/^[0-9 ]*//' | sort -fubdS 50% exec bash -lxv export TERM=putty-256color Taken from my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

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.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file


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: