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

Redirect bash built-in output to stdout
I've had a horrible time trying to pipe the output of some shell built-ins like 'time' to other programs. The built-in doesn't output to stdout or stderr most of the time but using the above will let you pipe the output to something else.

connects to a serial console
cu (call UNIX) establishes a full-duplex connection to another machine (*BSD) using a serial console. It becames more useful than screen if you have to send a BREAK signal. using cu just type "~#". $man cu http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=cu&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html

Get Nyan'd
Get nyan'd

Tar - Compress by excluding folders
If you give tar a list of filenames, it will not add the directories, so if you don't care about directory ownership or permissions, you can save some space. Tar will create directories as necessary when extracting. This command is limited by the maximum supported size of the argument list, so if you are trying to tar up the whole OS for instance, you may just get "Argument list too long".

Find and delete thunderbird's msf files to make your profile work quickly again.

password generator
make password randomly, default 8 chars, using bash3.X only, no external program.

Delete all but the latest 5 files, ignoring directories

Show directories in the PATH, one per line
quoteless

Do some learning...

seconds since epoch to ISO timestamp
No need to use perl, awk, nor /usr/bin/date -- bash's "printf" builtin will do it.


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: