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

Get own public IP address
Returns your external IP address to the command line using only wget

exclude a column with cut
Show all columns except 5th. This might help you save some typing if you are trying to exclude some columns from the output.

Probably, most frequent use of diff
This form is used in patches, svn, git etc. And I've created an alias for it: alias diff='diff -Naur --strip-trailing-cr' The latter option is especially useful, when somebody in team works in Windows; could be also used in commands like $ svn diff --diff-cmd 'diff --strip-trailing-cr'...

Replace space in filename
This commands removes space from all the files with specific extension. I've specifed *.jpg as an example.

Restore a local drive from the image on remote host via ssh

Limit the transfer rate and size of data over a pipe
This example will close the pipe after transferring 100MB at a speed of 3MB per second.

Merge video files together using mencoder (part of mplayer)
Using mplayer's mencoder, you can merge video files together. '-oac' specifies the audio encoding (here copy, to just copy and not compress) '-ovc' specifies the video encoding (same thing).

Better recursive grep with pretty colors... requires ruby and gems (run: "gem install rak")

display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)

Join lines
This command turns a multi-line file into a single line joined with <SOMETEXT>. To skip blank lines, use: $ perl -pe '(eof()||s/^\s*$//)||s/\n//g' file.txt


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: