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

Salvage a borked terminal
If you bork your terminal by sending binary data to STDOUT or similar, you can get your terminal back using this command rather than killing and restarting the session. Note that you often won't be able to see the characters as you type them.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Add temporary <1m entries to old cron
Old cron doesn't allow periods

List all Samba user name

View the newest xkcd comic.
This function displays the latest comic from xkcd.com. One of the best things about xkcd is the title text when you hover over the comic, so this function also displays that after you close the comic. To get a random xkcd comic, I also use the following: $xkcdrandom(){ wget -qO- dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random|tee >(feh $(grep -Po '(?

Makes the permissions of file2 the same as file1
same as the chmod example, but should also copy extended access control list attributes. deliberately stolen from: $man setfacl

Delete all non-printing characters from a file
tr has some predefined sets of characters that are more convenient to use than characters codes

du command without showing other mounted file systems

Get the Volume labels all bitlocker volumes had before being encrypted
Get information of volume labels of bitlocker volumes, even if they are encrypted and locked (no access to filesystem, no password provided). Note that the volume labels can have spaces, but only if you name then before encryption. Renaming a bitlocker partition after being encrypted does not have the same effect as doing it before.

Paged, colored svn diff
I put this in a shell script called "svndiff", as it provides a handy decorated "svn diff" output that is colored (which you can't see here) and paged. The -r is required so less doesn't mangle the color codes.


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: