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

Print just line 4 from a textfile
this method should be the fastest

Go up multiple levels of directories quickly and easily.
This is a kind of wrapper around the shell builtin cd that allows a person to quickly go up several directories. Instead of typing: cd ../.. A user can type: cd ... Instead of: cd ../../.. Type: cd .... Add another period and it goes up four levels. Adding more periods will take you up more levels.

Find the package that installed a command

Rename files in batch

Get your outgoing IP address
Get your external ip adress thanks to http://www.icanhazip.com

Find unused IPs on a given subnet

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

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

Color man pages
Add the followin to ~/.bashrc #colour export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;37m' export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m' export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'

View the latest astronomy picture of the day from NASA.
Substitute feh for the image viewer of your choice. display (part of imagemagick) seems to be a popular choice.


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: