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

Remove newlines from output
?Cat and grep? You can use only grep ("grep \. filename"). Better option is awk.

A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

Stop procrastination on Facebook.com
or echo '127.0.0.1 facebook.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts Do not execute this command if you don't know what you are doing.

flush memcached via netcat

Who invoked me? / Get parent command
Get the name of the parent command. This might be helpful, if you need to react on that information. E. g. a script called directly via ssh has got sshd as parent, manually invoked the parent process will probably be bash

Remove all unused kernels with apt-get
Remove old kernels (*-generic and *-generic-pae) via apt-get on debian/ubuntu based systems. Tested on ubuntu 10.04 - 12.04.

Remove all but one specific file

Command line calculator

Get an authorization code from Google
This is a basis for other Google API commands.

Delete all but the latest 5 files
yes 6 (tail from 6th line)


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: