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

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Merge files, joining each line in one line
Merge files, joining line by line horizontally. Very useful when you have a lot of files where each line represents an info about an event and you want to join them into a single file where each line has all the info about the same event See the example for a better understanding

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command
Allows you to edit your command using your chosen editor. Works in bash with "set -o vi".

Fastest segmented parallel sync of a remote directory over ssh
Mirror a remote directory using some tricks to maximize network speed. lftp:: coolest file transfer tool ever -u: username and password (pwd is merely a placeholder if you have ~/.ssh/id_rsa) -e: execute internal lftp commands set sftp:connect-program: use some specific command instead of plain ssh ssh:: -a -x -T: disable useless things -c arcfour: use the most efficient cipher specification -o Compression=no: disable compression to save CPU mirror: copy remote dir subtree to local dir -v: be verbose (cool progress bar and speed meter, one for each file in parallel) -c: continue interrupted file transfers if possible --loop: repeat mirror until no differences found --use-pget-n=3: transfer each file with 3 independent parallel TCP connections -P 2: transfer 2 files in parallel (totalling 6 TCP connections) sftp://remotehost:22: use sftp protocol on port 22 (you can give any other port if appropriate) You can play with values for --use-pget-n and/or -P to achieve maximum speed depending on the particular network. If the files are compressible removing "-o Compression=n" can be beneficial. Better create an alias for the command.

Print a cron formatted time for 2 minutes in the future (for crontab testing)
Another function to stick into your .bashrc This spits out the time two minutes in the future, but already formatted for pasting into your crontab file for testing without any thought required on your part. Frequently things don't work the way you expect inside a crontab job, and you probably want to find out now that your $PATH is completely different inside of cron or other global variables aren't defined. So this will generate a date you can use for testing now, and then later you can change it to run at 5:37 am on a Sunday evening.

Run a command as root, with a delay
$ sleep 1h ; sudo command or $ sudo sleep 1h ; sudo command won't work, because by the time the delay is up, sudo will want your password again.

Mirror the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
Mirror the entire NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive, all the way from 1995. The archive is close to 2.5 GB, with lots of files, so give it some time. The logs can be redirected to a file using '-o somefile'. You might also want to try '-nH' and the '--cut-dirs' options

Find all videos under current directory using MIME a.k.a not using extension
Videos are found using their MIME type. Thus no need to for an extension for the video file. This is a efficent version of "jnash" cmd (4086). Thanks for jnash. This cmd will only show video files while his cmd show files having "video" anywhere in path.

calulate established tcp connection of local machine
If you want prepend/append text just wrap in echo: $echo Connected: `netstat -an|grep -ci "tcp.*established"`

Null a file with sudo


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: