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 and delete empty dirs, start in current working dir

extract all urls from firefox sessionstore
This will extract all of the urls from a firefox session (including urls in a tab's history). The sessionstore.js file is in ~/.mozilla/firefox/{firefox profile}

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Check if the LHC has destroyed the world
This says if the LHC has destroyed the world. Run it in a loop to monitor the state of Earth. Might not work reliable, if the world has actually been destroyed.

Truncate long strings in columns and use custom header names
Using the --table-truncate ( -T ) option, you can specify the columns you will allow to be truncated. This helps when you have some columns that are unusually long, or a small terminal window. In this example we will print out the /etc/passwd file in columns. We are using a colon as our separator ( -s: ), defining that we want table output ( -t ), defining the column names ( -N ) and allowing the column NAME to be truncated ( -T ).

run a command whenever a file is touched
This is useful if you'd like to see the output of a script while you edit it. Each time you save the file the command is executed. I thought for sure something like this already exists - and it probably does. I'm on an older system and tend to be missing some useful things. Examples: $ ontouchdo yourscript 'clear; yourscript somefiletoparse' Edit yourscript in a separate window and see new results each time you save. $ ontouchdo crufty.html 'clear; xmllint --noout crufty.html 2>&1 | head' Keep editing krufty.html until the xmllint window is empty. Note: Mac/bsd users should use stat -f%m. If you don't have stat, you can use perl -e '$f=shift; @s=stat($f); print "$s[9]\n";' $1

List all files in a folder in a git repository by last commit date
This lists all the files in a folder, then finds the commit date for them one by one, then sorts them from newest to oldest

what model of computer I'm using?

List all databases in Postgres and their (byte/human) sizes, ordering by byte size descending
Get a listing of all of your databases in Postgres and their sizes, ordering by the largest size first. Requires that you give the -d parameter a valid database name that you can connect to.

Generate random IP addresses
It never ends


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: