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

vim as a pager - similar to less command but with color
use vim like less command pager but with color highlighting = pretty :p also u can use /usr/share/vim/vim73/macros/less.sh

Use nroff to view the man pages
Using nroff , it is possible to view the otherwise garbled man page with col command.

Display _something_ when an X app fails
When you run an X program from a terminal you can see any errors. But when it's run from another X program (eg from a menu item, from your fluxbox 'keys' file etc) it might just die and you see nothing (except perhaps in .xsession-errors). Instead, launch it via this command and you'll see the termination status, stderr and stdout. eg: "xlaunch firefox" or "xlaunch 'echo stdout; echo stderr >&2; false'": 'echo stdout; echo stderr >&2; false' failed with error 1 STDERR: stderr STDOUT: stdout

Mount Fat USB with RWX
after that, you can launch bash script in your usb drive in FAT32.

Watch and cat the last file to enter a directory
Great for watching things like Maildir's or any other queue directory.

raw MySQL output to use in pipes
-N removes header -s removes separator chars -r raw output After using these options, the MySQL ouptut can be used with pipes very easily

locate a filename, make sure it exists and display it with full details
use the locate command to find files on the system and verify they exist (-e) then display each one in full details.

Find the package that installed a command

Remove apps with style: nuke it from orbit
You can't stand programs x, y, and z. Remove all trace of their existence by adding this function to your config. It will remove the cruft, the settings, and such and such. This function doesn't even give a damn about you trying to remove programs that don't exist: it'll just for loop to the next one on your hit list.

Cleanup a (source) text file, removing trailing spaces/tabs and multiple consecutive blank lines
I used this command (in addition to a code formatting tool) to "cleanup" a bunch of PHP files


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: