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

Retry the previous command until it exits successfully

Big Countdown Clock with hours, minutes and seconds
Figlet is easy to find for download on the internet, and works for any text. Quite cool.

Sort specific lines while editing within vi
Sort lines within vi editor. In this example sort lines 33-61 and lines 4-9 asciibetically.

flush memcached via netcat

Go to the previous sibling directory in alphabetical order
Based on linkinpark342 suggestion. Sometimes you have to browse your way through a lot of sub-directories. This command cd to the previous sub-directory in alphabetical order. For example, if you have the directories "lectures/01-intro", "lectures/02-basic", "lectures/03-advanced" and so on, and your PWD is "02-basic", it jumps to "01-intro".

Performance tip: compress /usr/
Periodically run the one-liner above if/when there are significant changes to the files in /usr/ = Before rebooting, add following to /etc/fstab : = $ /squashed/usr/usr.sfs /squashed/usr/ro squashfs loop,ro 0 0 $ usr /usr aufs udba=reval,br:/squashed/usr/rw:/squashed/usr/ro 0 0 No need to delete original /usr/ ! (unless you don't care about recovery). Also AuFS does not work with XFS

Change tha mac adresse
eth0 = the name of the interface 00:01:02:03:04:05 = the new mac adresse the same thing for wireless card $ sudo iwconfig eth1 hw ether 00:01:02:03:04:05

A nice command for summarising repeated information

open path with your default program (on Linux/*BSD)
open [path] in the default program, regardless of which Desktop Environment you use (KDE, GNOME, etc.) Works on all "freedesktop.org" compatible desktop environments

Rip a video for archiving, from any site
Download video files from a bunch of sites (here is a list https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html). The options say: base filename on title, ignores errors and continue partial downloads. Also, stores some metadata into a .json file plz. Paste youtube users and playlists for extra fun. Protip: git-annex loves these 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: