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

Numeric zero padding file rename
rename file name with fixed length nomeric format pattern

Extracting a range of pages from a PDF, using GhostScript
In this example we extract pages 14-17

Get fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) for IP address with failure and multiple detection

Readd all files is missing from svn repo
When working on a big proeject with SVN, you create quite much files, for now! Can just sit here and type svn add for all of them! svn status will return a list of all of file which get ?(not add), "M"(Modified), "D"(Deleted)! This code just grep "?" flag, then add it into SVN again!

Getting the ip address of eth0

Recursively remove directory with many files quickly
rsync'ing an empty directory over a directory to be deleted recursively is much faster than using rm -rf, for various reasons. Relevant only for directories with really a lot of files.

Merges given files line by line
In the above example all files have 4 lines. In "file1" consecutive lines are: "num, 1, 2, 3", in "file2": "name, Jack, Jim, Frank" and in "file3": "scores, 1300, 1100, 980". This one liner can save considerate ammount of time when you're trying to process serious portions of data. "-d" option allows one to set series of characters to be used as separators between data originating from given files.

vmstat/iostat with timestamp
Also useful with iostat, or pretty much anything else you want timestamped.

Show errors in the kernel ring buffer
Much more useful then parsing syslog

Limit bandwidth usage by any program
Trickle is a voluntary, cooperative bandwidth shaper. it works entirely in userland and is very easy to use. The most simple application is to limit the bandwidth usage of programs.


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: