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

Create a tar archive using xz compression
compress directory archive with xz compression, if tar doesn't have the -J option (OSX tar doesn't have -J)

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

Find all files with colons and replace with underscores; current directory and below (recursive).

Find recursively, from current directory down, files and directories whose names contain single or multiple whitespaces and replace each such occurrence with a single underscore.
Note the g for global in the perl expression; without it, only the first occurrence in the name would be replaced.

Know SELinux status
Usefule to check whether SELinux is in force or disabled. Though you need to be superuser while execute this command.

Get info on RAM Slots and Max RAM.

vi a remote file
notice the double slash

Write a listing of all directories and files on the computer to a compressed file.
This command is meant to be used to make a lightweight backup, for when you want to know which files might be missing or changed, but you don't care about their contents (because you have some way to recover them). Explanation of parts: "ls -RFal /" lists all files in and below the root directory, along with their permissions and some other metadata. I think sudo is necessary to allow ls to read the metadata of certain files. "| gzip" compresses the result, from 177 MB to 16 MB in my case. "> all_files_list.txt.gz" saves the result to a file in the current directory called all_files_list.txt.gz. This name can be changed, of course.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

A nice command for summarising repeated information


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: