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

Scroll up (or Down (PgDn)) in any terminal session (except KDE)

tail: watch a filelog
-f file(s) to be monitorized -n number of last line to be printed on the screen in this example, the content of two files are displayed

Find jpeg images and copy them to a central location
Use if you have pictures all over the place and you want to copy them to a central location Synopsis: Find jpg files translate all file names to lowercase backup existing, don't overwrite, preserve mode ownership and timestamps copy to a central location

List all available commands (bash, ksh93)

Are the two lines anagrams?
This works by reading in two lines of input, turning each into a list of one-character matches that are sorted and compared.

Show a notify popup in Gnome that expires in specified time and does not leave an icon in notifications tray
Tested in Gnome 3.4

Command to Show a List of Special Characters for bash prompt (PS1)
I use this command (PS1) to show a list bash prompt's special characters. I tested it against A flavor of Red Hat Linux and Mac OS X

Find ulimit values of currently running process
When dealing with system resource limits like max number of processes and open files per user, it can be hard to tell exactly what's happening. The /etc/security/limits.conf file defines the ceiling for the values, but not what they currently are, while $ ulimit -a will show you the current values for your shell, and you can set them for new logins in /etc/profile and/or ~/.bashrc with a command like: $ ulimit -S -n 100000 >/dev/null 2>&1 But with the variability in when those files get read (login vs any shell startup, interactive vs non-interactive) it can be difficult to know for sure what values apply to processes that are currently running, like database or app servers. Just find the PID via "ps aux | grep programname", then look at that PID's "limits" file in /proc. Then you'll know for sure what actually applies to that process.

create an emergency swapfile when the existing swap space is getting tight
Create a temporary file that acts as swap space. In this example it's a 1GB file at the root of the file system. This additional capacity is added to the existing swap space.

C function manual


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: