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

Reconstruct standard permissions for directories and files in current directory

SVN script for automatically adding and deleting files

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Get the full path of a bash script's Git repository head.
Rather than complicated and fragile paths relative to a script like "../../other", this command will retrieve the full path of the file's repository head. Safe with spaces in directory names. Works within a symlinked directory. Broken down: $cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" temporarily changes directories within this expansion. Double quoted "$(dirname" and ")" with unquoted ${BASH_SOURCE[0]} allows spaces in the path. $git rev-parse --show-toplevel gets the full path of the repository head of the current working directory, which was temporarily changed by the "cd".

Debug your makefile
Say your dependencies specified in your Makefile (or dates on your source files) is causing 'make' to skip some source-files (that it should not) or on the other other end, if it is causing make to always build some source-files regardless of dates of target, then above command is handy to find out what 'make' thinks of your date v/s target date-wise or what dependencies are in make's view-point. The egrep part removes the extra noise, that you might want to avoid.

See entire packet payload using tcpdump.
This command will show you the entire payload of a packet. The final "s" increases the snaplength, grabbing the whole packet.

Make .bashrc function to backup the data you changed last houres
The original overwrites any previous backups, and only saves exactly the last hours worth, but not 1 hour + 1 minute. This version creates or appends files, and backs up everything since the last backup (using the backups timestamp as the reference), plus it uses TMPDIR if set.

grep certain file types recursively

check open ports without netstat or lsof

This allows you to find a string on a set of files recursivly
The -r is for recursive, -F for fixed strings, --include='*.txt' identifies you want all txt files to be search any wildcard will apply, then the string you are looking for and the final * to ensure you go through all files and folders within the folder you execute 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: