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

Always tail/edit/grep the latest file in a directory of timestamped files
zsh only If you have this command in your history, you can always re-run it and have it reference the latest file. The glob matches all timestamped files and then the resulting array is sorted by modification time (m) and then the first element in the sorted array is chosen (the latest)

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Move all but the newest 100 emails to a gzipped archive

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Watch the progress of 'dd'
run this in another terminal, were xxxx is the process ID of the running dd process. the progress will report on the original terminal that you ran dd on

view the system memory in clear text
see what's in your memory right now... sometimes you find passwords, account numbers and url's that were recently used. Anyone have a safe command to clear the memory without rebooting?

Display your ${PATH}, one directory per line
This works in bash and zsh. You may also want to alias it, if you need to look at it often... $ alias lpath="echo \$PATH | tr : \\\\n" "\$PATH" to make sure to look at your current $PATH

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

create a progress bar...
A simple way yo do a progress bar like wget.

search for text in files. recursive.
recursively search dir for a a particular file type, search each file for a particular text.


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: