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

add all files not under version control to repository
With the force options the same results can be achieved

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

grep (or anything else) many files with multiprocessor power
Parallel does not suffer from the risk of mixing of output that xargs suffers from. -j+0 will run as many jobs in parallel as you have cores. With parallel you only need -0 (and -print0) if your filenames contain a '\n'. Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/

remove execute bit only from files. recursively

Signals list by NUMBER and NAME

Show a file in less without wrapping long lines

Creat a tar file for backup info
Use tar command for a backup info with a date of creation

Insert the last argument of the previous command
for example if you did a: $ ls -la /bin/ls then $ ls !$ is equivalent to doing a $ ls /bin/ls

archlinux:Delete packages from pacman cache that are older than 7 days
Sometimes my /var/cache/pacman/pkg directory gets quite big in size. If that happens I run this command to remove old package files. Packages that we're upgraded in last N days are kept in case you are forced to downgrade a specific package. The command is obviously Arch Linux related.

most used commands in history (comprehensive)
Most of the "most used commands" approaches does not consider pipes and other complexities. This approach considers pipes, process substitution by backticks or $() and multiple commands separated by ; Perl regular expression breaks up each line using | or < ( or ; or ` or $( and picks the first word (excluding "do" in case of for loops) note: if you are using lots of perl one-liners, the perl commands will be counted as well in this approach, since semicolon is used as a separator


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: