Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

All commands

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 10,707 results
echo lowercaseword | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'
2013-05-11 11:08:37
User: eastwind
Functions: echo tr
-1
Up
Down
convert a string from lower case into uppercase
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tail -F some.log | perl -ne 'print time(), "\n";' | uniq -c
2013-05-11 04:51:22
User: grana
Functions: perl tail uniq
Tags: tail wc
0
Up
Down
Lines per second in a log file
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat file.gz.cpt *[a-z] | ccdecrypt -k yoursecretpassword | tar -xzf -
2013-05-10 12:44:12
User: symgryph
Functions: cat tar
0
Up
Down
Put files back together after encrypted with tar and ccrypt
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tar czf - /directory/to/tar | ccrypt -k yourpassword | split -b50m - /final/encrypted.cpt
2013-05-10 12:42:47
User: symgryph
Functions: split tar
0
Up
Down
encrypt, split and get ready for dvd a large file via tar and ccrypt
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
mtr <URL>
2013-05-10 09:48:23
User: techie
-13
Up
Down
The awesome ping / traceroute combination

In the sample output I used google.com.

Show sample output | Comments (11) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
git-createrepo() { repos_path='/srv/git/'; mkdir $repos_path$1; cd $repos_path$1; git init --bare; echo "Repository location: ssh://$USER@`cat /etc/HOSTNAME``pwd`"; cd -; }
2013-05-09 21:44:24
User: batandwa
Functions: cd echo init mkdir
Tags: git
-3
Up
Down
Create a git repository

Creates a git repository in a predefined location.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
inotifywait -m -r .
2013-05-09 16:14:25
User: hendry
8
Up
Down
Debug how files are being accessed by a process

Instead of looking through `lsof` results, use inotifywait!

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | sort -n -k2 | awk '{if ($2 < 300) print($0)}'
2013-05-09 13:09:58
User: lili
Functions: awk ps sort
0
Up
Down
Display the specified range of process information

Display all pid less the 300 processes info

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
watch 'ls -tr1 | tail -n1 | xargs tail'
2013-05-09 11:37:59
User: batandwa
Functions: tail watch xargs
Tags: tail ls xargs watch
-5
Up
Down
Poll and print end of lates modified file

Watches for file modifications in the current directory and tails the file.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tac [FILE]
2013-05-09 09:19:51
User: andreasS
Functions: tac
-3
Up
Down
Print file content in reverse order
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls *.jpg | xargs -n1 -i cp {} /external-hard-drive/directory
2013-05-09 08:33:01
User: techie
Functions: cp ls xargs
Tags: ls xargs
-8
Up
Down
Copy all images to external hard-drive
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
vim -R /etc/passwd
2013-05-09 08:28:32
User: techie
Functions: vim
Tags: vim
-8
Up
Down
Open a file using vim in read only (like less)
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
vim +143 filename.txt
2013-05-09 08:24:28
User: techie
Functions: vim
Tags: vim
-6
Up
Down
Go to a specified line in a file
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
awk '!($0 in array) { array[$0]; print }' temp
2013-05-09 08:23:30
User: techie
Functions: awk
Tags: awk
-1
Up
Down
Remove duplicate lines using awk
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sed -n '1!G;h;$p' techie.txt
2013-05-09 08:22:36
User: techie
Functions: sed
Tags: sed
-4
Up
Down
Print file content in reverse order
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find -iname "MyCProgram.c" -exec md5sum {} \;
2013-05-09 08:21:18
User: techie
Functions: find md5sum
-8
Up
Down
Execute commands on files found by the find command
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
grep -A 3 -i "example" demo_text
2013-05-09 08:20:31
User: techie
Functions: grep
Tags: grep
-6
Up
Down
Print the matched line, along with the 3 lines after it.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
netstat -nlput
2013-05-09 08:15:04
User: techie
Functions: netstat
-5
Up
Down
Prints tcp and udp connections
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -name .git -print0 | while read -d $'\0' g; do echo "$g"; cd "$g"; git gc --aggressive; cd -; done
2013-05-09 08:03:23
User: Tungmar
Functions: cd echo find read
0
Up
Down
Run git gc in all git repositories bellow .

git gc should be run on all git repositories every 100 commits. This will help do do so if you have many git repositories ;-)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps aux | awk '/chrome/ {s+=$6}END{print s/1024}';
2013-05-09 02:30:44
User: DaSheep
Functions: awk ps
0
Up
Down
Chrome sucks
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svg2png(){ png="${1%.*}.png"; inkscape --export-png="$png" --without-gui "$1" && pngcrush -brute -rem alla -rem text "$png" "$png.new" && mv "$png.new" "$png";}
2013-05-08 15:21:52
User: inductiveload
Functions: mv
0
Up
Down
Convert an SVG to png and crush filesize

Convert an SVG to PNG and then crush the filesize brutally with pngcrush. Good for icons and website junk that you want to keep small, expecially before base64 encoding.

Uses inkscape, not imagemagick, as IM doesn't always handle gradients well. This way also seems to sometime save some file size (eg. 619 with Inkscape compared to 695 with IM).

IM can do general images:

img2png(){ png="${1%.*}.png"; convert -background none "$1" "$png" && pngcrush -brute -rem alla -rem text "$png" "$png.new" && mv "$png.new" "$png"; }
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -A -o rss,command | grep [C]hrome | awk '{sum+=$1} END {printf("%sMB\n",sum/1024)}'
2013-05-08 13:30:59
User: seanubis
Functions: awk grep ps
Tags: grep chrome
0
Up
Down
Chrome sucks
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
watch "ls -al myfile"
2013-05-08 12:40:40
User: tonk
Functions: watch
Tags: monitoring monitor
0
Up
Down
Monitoring file change while a copy
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cp -p data.json data.yml
2013-05-08 12:06:56
User: tonk
Functions: cp
Tags: json yaml
0
Up
Down
Convert JSON to YAML
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -o rss= -C Chrome | (x=0; while read rss; do ((x+=$rss)); done; echo $((x/1024)))
2013-05-08 07:22:03
User: sesom42
Functions: echo ps read
0
Up
Down
Chrome sucks
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate