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

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Make a statistic about the lines of code
use find to grep all .c files from the target directory, cat them into one stream, then piped to wc to count the lines

One liner to kill a process when knowing only the port where the process is running

Prints the latest modified files in a directory tree recursively
Sorts by latest modified files by looking to current directory and all subdirectories

Get your bash scripts to handle options (-h, --help etc) and spit out auto-formatted help or man page when asked!!
This will make your bash scripts better!! process-getopt is a wrapper around getopt(1) for bash that lets you define command line options (eg -h, --help) and descriptions through a single function call. These definitions are then used in runtime processing of command line options as well as in generating help and man pages. It also saves a little time in coding and in producing nicely formatted documentation. It is quite similar to GNU's argp in glibc for compiled languages and OptionParse for python. See: Linux Gazette article 162: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/162/hepple.html, http://sourceforge.net/projects/process-getopt, http://bhepple.freeshell.org/oddmuse/wiki.cgi/process-getopt

sudo for launching gui apps in background
Need package: gksu Note: Launching gui app in background that needs sudo, won't work great with our old friendly style of launching: $ sudo gedit /etc/passwd & because this would put sudo in background ! Using gksudo as demonstrated, would popup a gui sudo window. May be this is a common knowledge, but not knowing this frustrated me during my newbie year.

Print every Nth line (to a maximum)
Thanks to knoppix5 for the idea :-) Print selected lines from a file or the output of a command. Usage: $ every NTH MAX [FILE] Print every NTH line (from the first MAX lines) of FILE. If FILE is omitted, stdin is used. The command simply passes the input to a sed script: $ sed -n -e "${2}q" -e "0~${1}p" ${3:-/dev/stdin} print no output $ sed -n quit after this many lines (controlled by the second parameter) $ -e "${2}q" print every NTH line (controlled by the first parameter) $ -e "0~${1}p" take input from $3 (if it exists) otherwise use /dev/stdin ${3:-/dev/stdin}

Get the date for the last Saturday of a given month
If your locale has Monday as the first day of the week, like mine in the UK, change the two $7 into $6

Find the package that installed a command

Debug a remote php application (behind firewall) using ssh tunnel for XDEBUG port 9000
If you need to xdebug a remote php application, which is behind a firewall, and you have an ssh daemon running on that machine. you can redirect port 9000 on that machine over to your local machine from which you run your xdebug client (I am using phpStorm) So, run this command on your local machine and start your local xdebug client, to start debugging. more info: http://code.google.com/p/spectator/wiki/Installing


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: