Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

All commands

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 10,560 results
wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip
2013-03-15 13:25:07
User: opexxx
Functions: wget
Tags: wget
0
Up
Down
speedtest

alias speedtest='wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip'

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
curl ip.appspot.com
2013-03-15 13:23:19
User: opexxx
0
Up
Down
my ip
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9!@#$%^&*' < /dev/urandom | fold -w 12 | head -n 1
2013-03-15 13:20:32
User: opexxx
Functions: fold head tr
1
Up
Down
Generate password
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get clean
2013-03-15 13:19:26
User: opexxx
Functions: sudo
-12
Up
Down
system update
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
while (true); do date --utc; done | uniq -c
2013-03-15 12:05:37
User: hute37
Functions: date uniq
Tags: cygwin performance
2
Up
Down
fork performance test

grabbed from Andrew Aylett post:

http://superuser.com/questions/133313/can-i-speed-up-cygwins-fork

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -hor ofx[a-zA-Z]*.h src/ | grep -o ofx[^\.]* >> addons.make
2013-03-15 11:29:50
User: egeoffray
Functions: grep
Tags: openframeworks
0
Up
Down
Add ofxAddons mentioned in source files, into addons.make

ofxGui

ofxFX

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
while read line; do export $line; done < <(cat input)
2013-03-15 08:14:04
User: dario
Functions: cat export read
Tags: bash oneliner environment
0
Up
Down
export key-value pairs list as environment variables

This exports all lines of input file as environment variables, assuming each line is like these:

OH=YEAH

FU=UUUU

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' < input.txt > output.txt
2013-03-14 19:14:09
User: jonatasnona
Functions: tr
-1
Up
Down
convert uppercase to lowercase
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
iconv -f utf8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT <output-file>
2013-03-14 19:12:29
User: jonatasnona
Functions: iconv
1
Up
Down
remove accented chars
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
jockey-text -l
2013-03-14 18:04:23
User: dynaguy
0
Up
Down
Find out which driver is in use

I tested this command on Ubuntu.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
${0##-}
2013-03-14 17:30:37
User: gustavocastro
0
Up
Down
launch bash without using any letters
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
pwd|grep -o '/'|perl -ne '$x.="./.";print`readlink -f $x`'|xargs -tn1 chmod 755
2013-03-14 12:03:44
User: luke_skywalker
Functions: chmod grep perl pwd xargs
Tags: perl xargs grep chmod
0
Up
Down
Ensure path permissions from '.' prior to root

`pwd` returns the current path

`grep -o` prints each slash on new line

perl generates the paths sequence: './.', './../.', ...

`readlink` canonicalizes paths (it makes the things more transparent)

`xargs -tn1` applies chmod for each of them. Each command applied is getting printed to STDERR.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris /etc/localtime
2013-03-14 11:53:09
User: egeoffray
Functions: cp sudo
Tags: Debian date
0
Up
Down
Change your timezone
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls
2013-03-14 01:28:01
User: yingkailiang
Functions: ls
-1
Up
Down
ls
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
watch -d=c -n3 'lsof -itcp -iudp -c php'
2013-03-14 01:24:50
User: AskApache
Functions: watch
Tags: lsof PHP watch
0
Up
Down
Watch your websites php

Shows files and processes of the command php

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
A=$(ip addr show dev eth0); A=${A##*inet }; echo ${A%%/*}
2013-03-13 23:07:37
User: charley
Functions: echo
0
Up
Down
Get eth0 ip

bash only - no grep, sed, awk, whatever - zero overhead

alternatively using ifconfig instead of "ip addr ..."

A=$(ifconfig eth0); A=${A##*inet addr:}; echo ${A%% *}

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
export l=$1; shift; rename 'my $l=$ENV{'l'}; my $z="0" x $l; s/\d+/substr("$z$&",-$l,$l)/e' "$@"
2013-03-13 15:14:20
User: hgrupht13
Functions: export rename
Tags: sorting file rename
0
Up
Down
convert finenames containing a numeric index from differing to fixed index-length; padding required zeroes in front of first number

Use it as bash-script.

The first positional parameter specifies the fixed length of the numerical index.

Further params specify the files to manipulate.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
which <command> > /dev/null 2>&1 && echo Success!
2013-03-13 10:04:42
User: skkzsh
Functions: echo which
Tags: which
-4
Up
Down
Do I have this command?

or

which <command> > /dev/null 2>&1 || echo Error!

For example, I write

which colordiff > /dev/null 2>&1 && alias diff=colordiff

in my `~/.bashrc`.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -qahlSr # list all files in size order - largest last
2013-03-13 09:52:07
User: mpb
Functions: ls size
0
Up
Down
ls -qahlSr # list all files in size order - largest last

I find it useful, when cleaning up deleting unwanted files to make more space, to list in size order so I can delete the largest first.

Note that using "q" shows files with non-printing characters in name.

In this sample output (above), I found two copies of the same iso file both of which are immediate "delete candidates" for me.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tar zcf - foo | gpg -c --cipher-algo aes256 -o foo.tgz.gpg
2013-03-13 09:44:39
User: skkzsh
Functions: gpg tar
Tags: Security GPG Encryption tar
0
Up
Down
Encrypt directory with GnuPG and tar

Decrypt with:

gpg -o- foo.tgz.gpg | tar zxvf -
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
xfconf-query -c xfce4-session -np '/shutdown/ShowSuspend' -t 'bool' -s 'false'
2013-03-13 09:14:36
User: snafu
Tags: xfce config
1
Up
Down
Remove Suspend option from XFCE logoff dialog
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
notify-send -i mail_new 'Mail watcher' 'You have new mail!'
2013-03-13 09:11:39
User: snafu
Tags: mail mailwatcher config
-1
Up
Down
mailwatcher on-new-mail command
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
chromium --app="https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/745/?mui=ca"
2013-03-13 09:10:11
User: snafu
Tags: mail mailwatcher config
0
Up
Down
mailwatcher on-click command
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn revert .
2013-03-13 06:07:42
User: zhenggc1
Tags: svn awk xargs grep
-2
Up
Down
Revert all modified files in an SVN repo
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
true | mailx -n -a MYTEXT.txt -r my@mail.com -s log -S smtp=mail.com -S smtp-auth-user=MYUSER -S smtp-auth-password=MYPASSWORD FRIEND@mail.com
2013-03-12 16:37:30
User: xmuda
Functions: mailx true
5
Up
Down
mailx to send mails from console

It is the best way i found to send a mail from the console in my centos server.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate