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

history autocompletion with arrow keys
This will enable the possibility to navigate in the history of the command you type with the arrow keys, example "na" and the arrow will give all command starting by na in the history.You can add these lines to your .bashrc (without &&) to use that in your default terminal.

Read choice from user instantaneously
Usage exaple cmd $echo 'Sure to continue ??'; read -n1 choi; if [ "$choi" = 'y' ] || [ "$choi" = 'Y' ]; then echo -e '\nExecuting..'; else echo 'Aborted'; fi

Exclude inserting a table from a sql import
Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

Random IPv4 address

get a rough estimate about how much disk space is used by all the currently installed debian packages
The vaule is expressed in megabytes

Recursive replace of directory and file names in the current directory.
no grep, no perl, no pipe. even better in zsh/bash4: $ for i in **/*oldname*; do "mv $i ${i/oldname/newname/}"; done No find, no grep, no perl, no pipe

make, or run a script, everytime a file in a directory is modified

List your MACs address
List all MAC addresses on a Linux box. sort -u is useful when having virtual interfaces.

Rename .JPG to .jpg recursively
Recursively rename .JPG to .jpg using standard find and mv. It's generally better to use a standard tool if doing so is not much more difficult.

Decrypt passwords from Google Chrome and Chromium.
Read this before you down voting and comment that it is not working -> Wont work on latest versions ~75> since database file is locked and has to be decrypted. This is useful if you have an old hdd with a chrome installation and want to decrypt your old passwords fast.


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: