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

shorten url using curl, sed and is.gd
Just create a function in your .bashrc like this shorturl() { curl -s -d URL="$1" http://is.gd/create.php | sed '/Your new shortened/!d;s/.*value="\([^"]*\)".*/\1/' }

detect partitions
`blkid` is an interface to libuuid - it can read Device Mapper, EVMS, LVM, MD, and regular block devices. -c /dev/null - Do not use cached output from /etc/blkid.tab or /etc/blkid/blkid.tab (RHEL) -i - Display I/O Limits (aka I/O topology) information (not available in RHEL) -p - Low-level superblock probing mode (not available in RHEL)

Clean up display when the bash prompt is displayed
This will cause bash to fix a garbled terminal before the prompt is printed. For example, if you cat a file with nonprintable character sequences, the terminal sometimes ends up in a mode where it only prints line drawing characters. This sequence will return the terminal to the standard character set after every command.

SVN Clean
Removes all unversioned files and folders from an svn repository. Also: $ svn status --no-ignore | grep ^I | awk '{print $2}' | xargs rm -rf will remove those files which svn status ignores. Handy to add to a script which is in your path so you can run it from any repository (a la 'svn_clean.sh').

Remove all unused kernels with apt-get
Note the double space: "...^ii␣␣linux-image-2..." Like 5813, but fixes two bugs: [1]This leaves the meta-packages 'linux-headers-generic' and 'linux-image-generic' alone so that automatic upgrades work correctly in the future. [2]Kernels newer than the currently running one are left alone (this can happen if you didn't reboot after installing a new kernel). I'm bummed that this took 228 characters. I'd like to see a simpler version.

Find a CommandlineFu users average command rating

diff will usually only take one file from STDIN. This is a method to take the result of two streams and compare with diff. The example I use to compare two iTunes libraries but it is generally applicable.
diff is designed to compare two files. You can also compare directories. In this form, bash uses 'process substitution' in place of a file as an input to diff. Each input to diff can be filtered as you choose. I use find and egrep to select the files to compare.

Rename files in batch

Print today's date in ISO format without calling an external command (bash 4)

recursively remove BOM


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: