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

Find files modified since a specific date
This command uses -newerXY to show you the files that are modified since a specific date. I recommend looking for "-newerXY" on the manpage to get the specifics.

Rename files in batch

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Print all /etc/passwd lines with duplicated uid
Prints all the lines in /etc/passwd belonging to users with a duplicated uid. It also adds the hostname to the beginning of the line. It's been tested in AIX, Solaris and Linux.

exit if another instance is running
runs only one instance.

Insert the last argument of the previous command

Create a new file

sort ugly text
Often, when sorting you want the sort to ignore extraneous characters. The b, d, and f tell sort to ignore leading blanks, use 'dictionary order' (ignore punctuation), and ignore (fold) case. Add a "u" if you only want one copy of duplicate lines. This is a great command to use within vim to sort lines of text, using !}sort -bdf

Rename all (jpg) files written as 3 number in 4 numbers.
Useful if you have a list of images called 1 2 3 4 and so on, you can adapt it to rewrite it as 4 (in this example) 0-padded number.

SAR - List the average memory usage for all days recorded under '/var/log/sa/*' using sar -r.


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: