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

Google URL shortener
Shorter and made into a function.

Get curenttly playing track in Last.fm radio

lotto generator

The BOFH Excuse Server

Copy your ssh public key to a server from a machine that doesn't have ssh-copy-id
If you use Mac OS X or some other *nix variant that doesn't come with ssh-copy-id, this one-liner will allow you to add your public key to a remote machine so you can subsequently ssh to that machine without a password.

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files Using -delete is faster than: $ find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm {} + $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \;

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Count number of files in subdirectories
For each directory from the current one, list the counts of files in each of these directories. Change the -maxdepth to drill down further through directories.

Get line number 12 (or n) from a file
Extracts only file number 12 from file. It's meant for text files. Replace 12 with the number you want. First line starts at 1 not 0. We use q on next line so doesn't process any line more.

redirect stdout and stderr each to separate files and print both to the screen


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: