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

Install Linux Kernel Headers

quick copy
Utilizes shell expansion of {} to give the original filename and a new filename as arguments to `cp`. Can easily be extended to make multiple copies.

Open multiple tabs in Firefox from a file containing urls
this will open a new tab in firefox for every line in a file the sleep is removable but i found that if you have a large list of urls 50+, and no sleep, it will try to open all the urls at once and this will cause them all to load a lot slower, also depending on the ram of your system sleep gives you a chance to close the tabs before they overload your ram, removing & >2/dev/null will yield unpredictable results.

Monitor all DNS queries seen by the local machine

Matrix Style
It's the same command as submitted, but first with a command to make all characters green. It's the only way it looked "matrix-like" on my gnome-terminal.

Stop and continue processing on a terminal
This will send the ASCII sequence for DC3 to the currently running tty which results in SIGSTOP (19). You can continue with ASCII sequence for DC1 by pressing CTRL+q which results in SIGCONT (18).

Copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local machine
This command will copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local one. Ensure you are in the local directory you want to populate with the remote files before running the command. To copy a directory and it's contents, you could: $ ssh user@host "(cd /path/to/a/directory ; tar cvf - ./targetdir)" | tar xvf - This is especially useful on *nix'es that don't have 'scp' installed by default.

Force GNU/Linux keyboard settings, layout and configuration
Bash snippet to force GNU/Linux keyboard settings, layout and configuration. Usefull when some GNU/Linux distributions such as *Ubuntu's store only limited configation options due to demonstration purposes on LiveUSB or Live persistent devices. Overcomes the English QWERTY to French AZERTY settings failure. Code bash en ligne de commande pour forcer l'adoption du clavier AZERTY sur les cl? USB bootable en Ubuntu.

Follow the flow of a log file
tailf same as tail -f follow the flow of a log file, showing it in real time to stdout.

Get full from half remembered commands
Show all commands having the part known by you. Eg: $apropos pdf | less


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: