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

Update file with patch
diff originalfile updatedfile > my.patch

Rename files in batch

move you up one directory quickly
In bash, this turns on auto cd. If a command is just a directory name, it cd's into that directory.

Fibonacci numbers with awk
recursive version, "pure" AWK

Slow down IO heavy process
Some IO intensive process make the system unresponsive. This function periodically starts/stops a process, which hopefully releases some resources for other activities. This function is useful when ionice is not available

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Change SSH RSA passphrase
Protects your secret identity with a passphrase. OSX 10.6 automatically does key forwarding and can store the passphrase in the keychain. For other OSes, use ssh -A or set ForwardAgent in ssh_config to enable forwarding. Then use ssh-agent/ssh-add.

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Print a random 8 digit number
Don't need to pipe the output into rs if you just tell jot to use a null separator character.

Print diagram of user/groups
Parses /etc/group to "dot" format and pases it to "display" (imagemagick) to show a usefull diagram of users and groups (don't show empty groups).


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: