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

List all bash shortcuts
This command shows the various shortcuts that can be use in bash, including Ctrl+L, Ctrl+R, etc... You can translate "\C-y" to Ctrl+y, for example.

print line and execute it in BASH
If script.sh contains only these two lines: $ uname -a $ whoami

Delete only binary files in a directory
Please note that binary file checking is NOT perfect. So, use it with caution. It does not delete hidden files whose name has a leading '.' character. And it regards an empty file as a binary file.

Compare a remote file with a local file

Remove all unused kernels with apt-get
Note the double space: "...^ii␣␣linux-image-2..." Like 5813, but fixes two bugs: [1]This leaves the meta-packages 'linux-headers-generic' and 'linux-image-generic' alone so that automatic upgrades work correctly in the future. [2]Kernels newer than the currently running one are left alone (this can happen if you didn't reboot after installing a new kernel). I'm bummed that this took 228 characters. I'd like to see a simpler version.

Rip a DVD to AVI format
Substitute whatever track number you want into the "dvd://1" parameter. The "-aid 128" is to select the English language.

Run netcat to server files of current folder

For a $FILE, extracts the path, filename, filename without extension and extension.
Useful for use in other scripts for renaming, testing for extensions, etc.

Attach screen over ssh
Directly attach a remote screen session (saves a useless parent bash process)

create iso image from a directory
create iso image from directory . Usefull for virtualised machine To create CD ISO image of directories that contain long file name or non-8.3 format (particularly if you want to burn the CD image for use in Windows system), use the -J option switch that generates Joliet directory records in addition to regular iso9660 file names. For example, to create CD image of Vista SP1 directory: mkisofs -o VitaSP1.iso -J VistaSP1


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: