All commands (14,184)

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 the biggest files recursively, no matter how many
This command will find the biggest files recursively under a certain directory, no matter if they are too many. If you try the regular commands ("find -type f -exec ls -laSr {} +" or "find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -laSr") the sorting won't be correct because of command line arguments limit. This command won't use command line arguments to sort the files and will display the sorted list correctly.

Create a bash script from last n commands
Uses history to get the last n+1 commands (since this command will appear as the most recent), then strips out the line number and this command using sed, and appends the commands to a file.

Force wrap all text to 80 columns in Vim
This is assuming that you're editing some file that has not been wrapped at 80 columns, and you want it to be wrapped. While in Vim, enter ex mode, and set the textwidth to 80 columns: $ :set textwidth=80 Then, press: $ gg to get to the top of the file, and: $ gqG to wrap every line from the top to the bottom of the file at 80 characters. Of course, this will lose any indentation blocks you've setup if typing up some source code, or doing type setting. You can make modifications to this command as needed, as 'gq' is the formatting command you want, then you could send the formatting to a specific line in the file, rather than to the end of the file. $ gq49G Will apply the format from your current cursor location to the 49th row. And so on.

Skip over .svn directories when using the
Put the positive clauses after the '-o' option.

Rename files in batch

Open Sublime-text in current directory

Speed up builds and scripts, remove duplicate entries in $PATH. Users scripts are oftern bad: PATH=/apath:$PATH type of thing cause diplicate.

Convert Youtube videos to MP3
youtube-dl has this functionality built in. If you're running an older version of youtube-dl, you can update it using `youtube-dl -U` (although if you have an older version, it probably doesn't download youtube videos anyway.) youtube-dl --help will show you other options that may come in useful.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Pull git submodules in parallel using GNU parallel
Make sure to run this command in your git toplevel directory. Modify `-j4` as you like. You can also run any arbitrary command beside `git pull` in parallel on all of your git submodules.


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: