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

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

rsync with progress bar.
transfer files from localhost to a remotehost.

Cleanup Python bytecode files
This command will erase all bytecode versions of Python modules under the current directory.

List all files modified by a command
This lists all files modified after calling some command using a temporal anchor.

do 'foo' until it exits successfully, pausing in between crashes
restart a buggy script when it dies. works great for "git svn fetch", which leaks memory like a sieve and eventually dies...making you restart it.

Print a row of characters the width of terminal
Unlike other methods that use pipes and exec software like tr or sed or subshells, this is an extremely fast way to print a line and will always be able to detect the terminal width or else defaults to 80. It uses bash builtins for printf and echo and works with printf that supports the non-POSIX `-v` option to store result to var instead of printing to stdout. Here it is in a function that lets you change the line character to use and the length with args, it also supports color escape sequences with the echo -e option. $ function L() { local l=; builtin printf -vl "%${2:-${COLUMNS:-`tput cols 2>&-||echo 80`}}s\n" && echo -e "${l// /${1:-=}}"; } With color: $ L "`tput setaf 3`=" 1. Use printf to store n space chars followed by a newline to an environment variable "l" where n is local environment variable from $COLUMNS if set, else it will use `tput cols` and if that fails it will default to 80. 2. If printf succeeds then echo `$l` that contains the chars, replacing all blank spaces with "-" (can be changed to anything you want). From: http://www.askapache.com/linux/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html http://www.askapache.com/linux/bash-power-prompt.html

du with colored bar graph
i'm using gawk, you may get varying mileage with other varieties. You might want to change the / after du to say, /home/ or /var or something, otherwise this command might take quite some time to complete. Sorry it's so obsfucated, I had to turn a script into a one-liner under 255 characters for commandlinefu. Note: the bar ratio is relative, so the highest ratio of the total disk, "anchors" the rest of the graph. EDIT: the math was slightly wrong, fixed it. Also, made it compliant with older versions of df.

Prints per-line contribution per author for a GIT repository
Figures out total line contribution per author for an entire GIT repo. Includes binary files, which kind of mess up the true count. If crashes or takes too long, mess with the ls-file option at the start: git ls-files -x "*pdf" -x "*psd" -x "*tif" to remove really random binary files git ls-files "*.py" "*.html" "*.css" to only include specific file types Based off my original SVN version: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/2787/prints-total-line-count-contribution-per-user-for-an-svn-repository

get all Amazon cloud (amazonws etc) ipv4 subnets


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: