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

Recursive replace of directory and file names in the current directory.
This should work anywhere perl and grep is available. :P

Runs previous command replacing foo by bar every time that foo appears
Very useful for rerunning a long command changing some arguments globally. As opposed to ^foo^bar, which only replaces the first occurrence of foo, this one changes every occurrence.

dump a single table of a database to file

Send a file to a pastebin from STDIN or a file, with a single function
echo "Hello world!" | sprunge # Redirect a stream to a pastebin sprunge ~/.bashrc # Send a file to a pastebin

Opens files containing search term in vim with search term highlighted
Takes the same arguments that ack does. E.g. ack-open -i "searchterm" opens all files below the current directory containing the search term. The search term is also highlighted within vim if you have hlsearch set. Works on zsh, unsure if it works on bash. Note: ubuntu users have to change ack to ack-grep unless you already have it aliased (as I do)

Give {Open,True}Type files reasonable names
Just a quick hack to give reasonable filenames to TrueType and OpenType fonts. I'd accumulated a big bunch of bizarrely and inconsistently named font files in my ~/.fonts directory. I wanted to copy some, but not all, of them over to my new machine, but I had no idea what many of them were. This script renames .ttf files based on the name embedded inside the font. It will also work for .otf files, but make sure you change the mv part so it gives them the proper extension. REQUIREMENTS: Bash (for extended pattern globbing), showttf (Debian has it in the fontforge-extras package), GNU grep (for context), and rev (because it's hilarious). BUGS: Well, like I said, this is a quick hack. It grew piece by piece on the command line. I only needed to do this once and spent hardly any time on it, so it's a bit goofy. For example, I find 'rev | cut -f1 | rev' pleasantly amusing --- it seems so clearly wrong, and yet it works to print the last argument. I think flexibility in expressiveness like this is part of the beauty of Unix shell scripting. One-off tasks can be be written quickly, built-up as a person is "thinking aloud" at the command line. That's why Unix is such a huge boost to productivity: it allows each person to think their own way instead of enforcing some "right way". On a tangent: One of the things I wish commandlinefu would show is the command line HISTORY of the person as they developed the script. I think it's that conversation between programmer and computer, as the pipeline is built piece-by-piece, that is the more valuable lesson than any canned script.

This command provides more color variety for the rainbow-like appearance by generating random color codes from 16 to 231 for adb logcat.

Print the last modified file

Show all available colors on your terminal.
Using perl and tput, show all the colors with numbers that your actual $TERM can handle. If want to remove the numbers at beginning of new line, it should be something like this: $perl -E 'say `tput setb $_`," "x `tput cols`, `tput sgr0` for 0 .. (`tput colors` - 1)'

read unixtimestamp with festival
you will hear how many seconds since 1.1.1970 in english words with billions, millions and thousands. this is very useful, if you want to get over to use the unixtimestamp instead of the 24 hour clock in your dayly life


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: