All commands (14,184)

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

Create backup copy of file, adding suffix of the date of the file modification (NOT today's date)
If your `date` command has `-r` option, you don't need `stat`

Rename all .jpeg and .JPG files to .jpg

Convert records in columns to csv

extract email adresses from some file (or any other pattern)
find all email addresses in a file, printing each match. Addresses do not have to be alone on a line etc. For example you can grab them from HTML-formatted emails or CSV files, etc. Use a combination of $...|sort|uniq$ to filter them.

grep -v with multiple patterns.
If you wanted to do all in one command, you could go w/ sed instead

Phrack 66 is out, but the .tar.gz is not there yet on phrack.org's website
Nice reading in the morning on the way to work, but sadly the .tar.gz for the whole issue 66 is not on phrack's website yet. So use wget to download.

leave a stale ssh session
When your ssh session hanged (probably due to some network issues) you can "kill" it by hitting those 3 keys instead of closing the entire terminal.

Check command history, but avoid running it
!whatever will search your command history and execute the first command that matches 'whatever'. If you don't feel safe doing this put :p on the end to print without executing. Recommended when running as superuser.

Start another X session in a window
You might have Xnest (older) rather than Xephyr. You can experiment with other desktops eg: startx /usr/bin/start-kde -- /usr/bin/Xephyr :2 You can start X on a remote machine (although I'd recommend vnc for anything slower than a LAN): startx /usr/bin/ssh -X gnome-session -- /usr/bin/Xephyr :2 Or just start another X session locally talking to the remote backend:

Read almost everything (Changelog.gz, .tgz, .deb, .png, .pdf, etc, etc....)
It allows customizing by means of lesspipe. You need to write a ~/.lessfilter script and put this into your ~/.bashrc: eval $(lesspipe) export LESS=-r


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: