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

Shows space used by each directory of the root filesystem excluding mountpoints/external filesystems (and sort the output)
Excludes other mountpoints with acavagni's "mountpoint" idea, but with -exec instead of piping to an xargs subshell. Then, calling "du" only once with -exec's "+" option. The first "\! -exec" acts as a test so only those who match are passed to the second "-exec" for du.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Locking and unlocking files and mailboxes
Programs for locking and unlocking files and mailboxes.This package includes several programs to safely lock and unlock files and mailboxes from the command line. These include: lockfile-create lockfile-remove lockfile-touchlock mail-lock mail-unlock mail-touchlock These programs use liblockfile to perform the file locking and unlocking, so they are guaranteed compatible with Debian's file locking policies.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Protect directory from an overzealous rm -rf *
Forces the -i flag on the rm command when using a wildcard delete.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Simple addicting bash game.
Really bored during class so I made this... Basically, you hold period (or whatever) and hit enter after a second and you need to make the next line of periods the same length as the previous line... My record was 5 lines of the same length. It's best if you do it one handed with your pointer on period and ring on enter.

archlinux: shows list of files installed by a package
Shows the files which the package, for example gvim, installed on your system.

Easily search running processes (alias).

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.


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: