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

Recursive Search and Replace
Finds the string in every file in an entire directory and all its subdirectories and replaces it with a new string. Especially useful when changing a machine's IP address or hostname - run it on /etc.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Follow tail by name (fix for rolling logs with tail -f)
If you use 'tail -f foo.txt' and it becomes temporarily moved/deleted (ie: log rolls over) then tail will not pick up on the new foo.txt and simply waits with no output. 'tail -F' allows you to follow the file by it's name, rather than a descriptor. If foo.txt disappears, tail will wait until the filename appears again and then continues tailing.

rsync...

Print lines in a text file with numbers in first column higher or equal than a value
A text file contains thousands of numbers. This command prints lines were the number is greater or equal than a specified value (134000000).

Scan for nearby Bluetooth devices.
Scans local area for visible Bluetooth devices. Use 'hcitool inq' to discover the type of device it is. And use -i hciX option to specify the local Bluetooth device to use.

Big Countdown Clock with hours, minutes and seconds
Figlet is easy to find for download on the internet, and works for any text. Quite cool.

pattern match in awk - no grep
Rather than chain a string of greps together and pipe them to awk, use awk to do all the work. In the above example, a string would be output to stdout if it matched pattern1 AND pattern2, but NOT pattern3.

determine if tcp port is open
@putnamhill, no need if statement in that case. && is a AND and || is a OR


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: