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

Grep recursively for a pattern and open all files that match, in order, in Vim, landing on 1st match

Watch the progress of 'dd'
This version was mentioned in the comments. Credits go to flatcap.

Link a deep tree of files all into on directory
If you want to pull all of the files from a tree that has mixed files and directories containing files, this will link them all into a single directory. Beware of filesystem files-per-directory limits.

Diff 2 file struct - Useful for branch diff and jars diff(uncompressed)
This is usefull to diff 2 paths in branches of software, or in different versions of a same zip file. So you can get the real file diff.

Hex math with bc
To do hex to binary: echo 'ibase=16; obase=2; 16*16' | bc # prints: 111100100 To do 16*16 from decimal to hex: echo 'ibase=10; obase=16; 16*16' | bc # prints: 100 You get the idea... Alternatively, run bc in interactive mode (see man page)

Display standard information about device
Queries the specified ethernet device for associated driver information

cycle through a 256 colour palette
Rainbow, instead of greys

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files
No need to loop when we have `xargs`. The sed command filters out the first line of `show databases` output, which is always "Database".

Chmod all directories (excluding files)
+ at the end means that many filenames will be passed to every chmod call, thus making it faster. And find own {} makes sure that it will work with spaces and other characters in filenames.

ring the bell


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: