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

HTTP Get of a web page via proxy server with login credentials
If you are behind a proxy server and have to authenticate with proxy server to browser web pages then you have to pass proxy server address and its port number along with user credentials to curl to got GET the page using curl. Example : "curl -U srikanth -x 167.85.103.70:8080 http://www.yahoo.com". In case you don't specify the password (as in the above example), curl will prompt to enter the password at the command line.

find out how many days since given date
You can also do this for seconds, minutes, hours, etc... Can't use dates before the epoch, though.

Rename duplicates from MusicBrainz Picard
Renames duplicates from MusicBrainz Picard, so you get the latest copy and not a bunch of duplicates.

A nice way to show git commit history, with easy to read revision numbers instead of the default hash

View any archive
Part of the "atool" package.

!* Tells that you want all of the *arguments* from the previous command to be repeated in the current command
Example: touch file{1,2,3}; chmod 777 !*

Reuse all parameter of the previous command line
!* is all of the arguments to the previous command rather than just the last one. This is useful in many situations. Here's a simple example: $ vi cd /stuff oops! [exit vi, twice] $ !* expands to: cd /stuff

Do a search-and-replace in a file after making a backup

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

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)


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: