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

[vim] Clear trailing whitespace in file
% acts on every line in the file. \s matches spaces. \+ matches one or more occurrences of what's right behind it. Character '$' matches end-of-line.

Prepend text to a file

Rename files in batch

archive all files containing local changes (svn)
This works more reliable for me ("cut -c 8-" had one more space, so it did not work)

Remount root in read-write mode.
Saved my day, when my harddrive got stuck in read-only mode.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Easy way to scroll up und down to change to one of n last visited directories.
This alias is meant to append n (here is n=10) most recently used cd commands to the bottom of history file. This way you can easily change to one of previous visited directories simply by hitting 1-10 times arrow up key. Hint: You can make more aliases implying the same rule for any set of frequently used long and complex commands like: mkisof, rdesktop, gpg...

backup your entire hosted website using cPanel backup interface and wget
this will connect to your hosted website service through the cPanel interface and use its backup tool to backup and download the entire website, locally. (do not forget to replace : YourUsername , YourPassword and YourWebsiteUrl for it to work )

Find and copy scattered mp3 files into one directory
No problem with word splitting. That should works on many Unix likes.

Watch the disk fill up with change highlighting
If you add the -d flag each difference in the command's output will be highlighted. I also monitor individual drives by adding them to df. Makes for a nice thin status line that I can shove to the bottom of the monitor.


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: