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

Reset terminal that has been buggered by binary input or similar

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

download file1 file2 file3 file4 .... file 100

ls not pattern
Negative shell globs already come with bash. Make sure to turn on extended pattern matching with 'shopt -e extglob'.

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Hide or show Desktop Icons on MacOS
Hides all Files and Folders on the MacOS Desktop. To show files and folders, type "true" instead of "false". "Finder" at the end is case sensitive, "finder" doesn’t work

find text in a file
this will find text in the directory you specify and give you line where it appears.

Transfer SSH public key to another machine in one step
This command sequence allows simple setup of (gasp!) password-less SSH logins. Be careful, as if you already have an SSH keypair in your ~/.ssh directory on the local machine, there is a possibility ssh-keygen may overwrite them. ssh-copy-id copies the public key to the remote host and appends it to the remote account's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. When trying ssh, if you used no passphrase for your key, the remote shell appears soon after invoking ssh user@host.

Create a visually twisted effect by alternating the direction of the "staples" effect vertically. The effect is achieved by moving odd-numbered lines from right to left and even-numbered lines from left to right.
The effect is achieved by moving odd-numbered lines from right to left and even-numbered lines from left to right. For odd-numbered lines (with an index j), the ((j + i) % 2 == 0) condition is satisfied. In this case, the line width is set to i, resulting in the line moving from left to right. For even-numbered lines, the ((j + i) % 2 == 0) condition is not satisfied. The line width is set to $(tput cols) - i, causing the line to move from right to left. This alternating direction of movement creates a twisted visual effect as the lines appear to move in opposite directions. The code runs in a continuous loop, repeatedly updating the lines with changing background colors. There is a slight pause of 0.05 seconds between each iteration to control the speed of the animation.

delete all leading and trailing whitespace from each line in file


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: