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

vi a remote file
notice the double slash

bulk rename files with sed, one-liner
Renames all files in a directory named foo to bar. foobar1 gets renamed to barbar1 barfoo2 gets renamed to barbar2 fooobarfoo gets renamed to barobarfoo NOTE: Will break for files with spaces AND new lines AND for an empty expansion of the glob '*'

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files Using -delete is faster than: $ find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm {} + $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \;

Copy your ssh public key to a server from a machine that doesn't have ssh-copy-id
This one is a bit more robust -- the remote machine may not have an .ssh directory, and it may not have an authorized_keys file, but if it does already, and you want to replace your ssh public key for some reason, this will work in that case as well, without duplicating the entry.

Play random music from blip.fm

Runs previous command but replacing
Replaces the first instance of 'foo' with 'bar'. To replace all instances of 'foo' with 'bar': !!:gs/foo/bar/

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Use vi commands to edit your command lines
If you spend all day editing in vi then switching your fingers to Emacs mode just for the command line can be difficult. Use set -o vi in your bash shell and enjoy the power of a real editor.

Delete .svn directories and content recursively
Use carefully have rm -rf ;-)

Colorful man
That command installs "most" and make this command as the default man reader. The "most" works like "less" (the current man reader), but it render colors for manpages and may do more things. Read "man most". You can see a preview here: http://www.dicas-l.com.br/dicas-l/20090718.php


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: