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

Create a tar archive using xz compression
Compress files or a directory to xz format. XZ has superior and faster compression than bzip2 in most cases. XZ is superior to 7zip format because it can save file permissions and other metadata data.

Delete a file/directory walking subdirectories (bash4 or zsh)

Find failures with journalctl
Sometimes things break. You can find the most recent errors using a combination of journalctl, along with the classic tools sort and uniq

intercept stdout/stderr of another process
similar to the previous command, but with more friendly output (tested on linux)

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Get NFL/MLB Scores/Time
change the nfl in the url to mlb or nba to get those score/times as well

Join lines
This command turns a multi-line file into a single line joined with <SOMETEXT>. To skip blank lines, use: $ perl -pe '(eof()||s/^\s*$//)||s/\n//g' file.txt

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.

List top ten files/directories sorted by size


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: