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

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file

for all who don't have the watch command
#Usage: watch timeinsecond "command"

Make a server's console beep when the network is down
This is like ping -a, but it does the opposite. It alerts you if the network is down, not up. Note that the beep will be from the speaker on the server, not from your terminal. Once a second, this script checks if the Internet is accessible and beeps if it is not. I define the Net as being "UP", if I can ping Google's public DNS server (8.8.8.8), but of course you could pick a different static IP address. I redirect the beep to /dev/console so that I can run this in the background from /etc/rc.local. Of course, doing that requires that the script is run by a UID or GID that has write permissions to /dev/console (usually only root). Question: I am not sure if the -W1 flag works under BSD. I have only tested this under GNU/Linux using ping from iputils. If anybody knows how portable -W is, please post a comment.

Get the full path of a bash script's Git repository head.
Rather than complicated and fragile paths relative to a script like "../../other", this command will retrieve the full path of the file's repository head. Safe with spaces in directory names. Works within a symlinked directory. Broken down: $cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" temporarily changes directories within this expansion. Double quoted "$(dirname" and ")" with unquoted ${BASH_SOURCE[0]} allows spaces in the path. $git rev-parse --show-toplevel gets the full path of the repository head of the current working directory, which was temporarily changed by the "cd".

find listening ports by pid
change 24073 to your pid

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.

Check if a domain is available and get the answer in just one line
Returns nothing if the domain exists and 'No match for domain.com' otherwise.

Sort files in folders alphabetically
Creates one letter folders in the current directory and moves files with corresponding initial in the folder.

Watching Command
If you need to keep an eye on a command whose output is changing, use the watch command. For example, to keep an eye on your load average

repeat any string or char n times without spaces between
(here is character '+' repeated 80 times) Sometimes needed to enhance the title of the script.


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: